Pacific Force, page 12
“What’s first, Nigel?” Rik yelled back.
“Not until the statute of limitations expires, young lady,” he laughed.
“Coward,” she laughed with him.
She’d known Nigel for more than a decade, having first learned how to skydive from the man before taking that knowledge and requiring the rest of the team know how to do it. Nobody else did it as a hobby, but they were much more boring than she was anyway.
Over the open door, a red light turned yellow, and Nigel moved to stand immediately next to the door itself. He looked out the gap just enough to confirm something in his own head before turning to her.
“Last chance to abort,” Nigel yelled at her.
“Last chance to jump with us,” she yelled back. “We’re committed.”
“Negative on that,” he said. “Someone has to survive this and tell the authorities where to look when you break a leg landing.”
“All fields around here,” Jake yelled.
“Plowed fields.” Nigel turned to him. “And the river and the canal. Plus, whatever else you hit. Remember that the ground might be so soft you stick the landing and break an ankle, so roll anyway and abandon the gear. I am already going to come back for it tomorrow, plus you paid for the damage insurance.”
Rik smiled and laughed just for the hell of it.
The yellow light began to blink green now.
“FIVE SECONDS!” Nigel roared.
Rik took a deep breath, released it, and then drew another one in.
She was already moving at a dead run when the light stopped blinking, a monotonous, green orb announcing the village of King’s Sutton passing below them right now.
“AND JUMP!” She heard Nigel call, but Rik was already free-falling by the time he got the words out.
Again, second most insane for Nigel maybe made her top ten this year, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. The other three would be diving into the night sky with her as fast as they could move.
The ground wasn’t that far away, and she had already programmed everyone’s altimeter to pull the ripcord not that far above the minimum safe jump.
If Nathaniel was down there, Pacific Force needed to land on his head.
Narrow boats were nice and everything if you wanted quiet.
Rik was in a hurry.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
Jake watched the tall blond leap into eternity and tried to catch her. He missed but knew that he’d be relatively close to her when they got down. Each helmet had a small marker light blinking on the back, and he picked her up, below and ahead.
There was no time for showing off, so he pulled arms and legs tight against his body and arrowed down. Hollyanne would do the same. Spencer might lag, but he wasn’t expected to rush immediately into combat on the ground anyway. Not like the other three.
Spencer was the spotter. The photojournalist who sat off to one side and gathered evidence. Rik had her bow broken down and stored in a small satchel along with half a dozen arrows. He and Hollyanne could go toe to toe with anyone, assuming nobody brought machine guns.
The night was silent compared to the roar of the aircraft, already rapidly receding. Cooler, too, but that would change as they got to the ground.
Jake picked up the long black stripe of the combined river and canal and railroad, running west of the village. The M40 highway was even further west, but they had been crossing NW to SE, so their target zone would put them hopefully in a field just a quarter mile south of the farmhouse, not that far from the cemetery he’d seen marked on the maps before they took off.
Grant would be racing here with the others, but they wouldn’t make great progress, having to cross all of the Birmingham metroplex in this mess, coming down from Manchester where Pacific Force had left the jet.
If it hadn’t been the middle of the night, so to speak, there were other runways that could have been used to land, but none close enough, save for a weird, triangular field used for skydiving and other sports rather than anything commercial. No lights and no controller, plus it was about three miles away from the target, and they’d be coming in without a vehicle to get them that last distance.
As Rik had said, completely insane, but fast. That was going to be the critical part.
The chute opened right on time, slowing him with heavy jar. Jake’s hands went up and automatically found the handles he needed to steer.
They were about to fall out of the sky as fast as they could, guided by the moonlight and the nearby village’s glow, and rendezvous at the cemetery just long enough to make their stalk. He was being carried a little east and south by the breeze, but that was just another large field.
Below, a single vehicle illuminated Mill Lane as it drove south from the village. Jake had a momentary spike of terror that it might turn in at the farmhouse, but it kept going.
There was just enough glow from everything that Jake could see the trees starting to get serious about leaves, but not the heavier cover they would provide come summer. He saw a ghost nearby and realized that Hollyanne had caught up with him, and they would land almost simultaneously, like a competitive performance sport of synchronized skydiving.
He drew in a breath as he got close, mindful of what Nigel had said about plowed fields being too soft on landing for you to expect to hit running. Jake blew everything out and allowed himself to crumble up in a ball and roll a little as the ground reached out and caught him.
Soft. Freshly plowed and sown, if he had to guess. Hopefully the seeds were just getting going and he hadn’t left a Jake-sized hole in what would grow later. He caught his breath and grabbed lines, pulling everything into a ball. The breeze he’d had above had fallen to almost nothing here, so the chute was relatively easy to gather up.
Jake got everything into a bundle, wrapped the cords around it quickly, and stripped the helmet, goggles, and jumpsuit off, adding them to the pile.
He had a rendezvous with someone and didn’t feel like making Nathaniel wait.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Hollyanne moved up to the hedge surrounding the cemetery a little ahead of Jake, but she’d been in a hurry. Rik was already there on the southeast corner, so she moved towards the woman, the two of them watching the farmhouse across the two fields and various hedges.
Spencer actually arrived at the same time as Jake. She turned to them both.
“Anything?” Jake asked.
“Quiet,” Rik offered. “No idea if alarms would be external, but I doubt it. If you needed help here, it needed to come from someplace larger and specialized, so Birmingham would be my guess. No police constable would be of much use in this sort of problem.”
Hollyanne noted that the woman had assembled her bow already but was carrying it with one of those blunt, stun-tips nocked. Taking prisoners. Useful to know, unless she’d only had the one flash/bang and had used it last night.
You had to be careful what you smuggled into England. Even Pacific Force could only bend the rules so far.
Jake paused a little longer before he spoke, but from his body language, he wasn’t going to put her in charge of this phase. They’d discussed it while getting ready but made no decisions.
“Rik, you lead the stalk,” Jake announced in a quiet voice. “Spencer, you have the rear wing flank. Hollyanne and I will have wingback positions inside. Remember that we’ve presumably got help coming down from Northampton, once those folks get rerouted from their original plan to flood the place, but no cops will be vectored down onto this location until we call them in or someone inside triggers a panic button.”
“Everyone set phones on silent-only mode,” Rik said. “We’ll move fast but we are functionally out of radio contact from this moment, so don’t even bring them out to check time or messages until I say, because I need the darkness, and we don’t know where the cameras are. I am shooting on movement and expecting Hollyanne and Jake to take down anyone I engage immediately afterwards. Spencer, you can record audio for later. Questions?”
“None,” Hollyanne replied glancing at the others.
“Let’s move.”
And Rik was off.
They moved along the rear hedge of the cemetery and then pushed their way through another hedge into the field just north of it. This field was also plowed and planted, but looking back, there was no light to reveal them, so Hollyanne wasn’t surprised when Rik cut straight across, angling in on the target.
Maps had been a bit iffy and out of date, so they had to rely on experience and guts from here. Rik got them to a spot where a stream ran, winding a little as it moved, but not that deep a cut into the land. There was a greater chance of turning an ankle than anything, but they all crossed easily enough and ended up crouched down in a weird backyard.
Or maybe it was normal. Hollyanne hadn’t grown up on a farm, so she had no idea what farmers kept behind the house. That might be a garden that wasn’t awake yet. Or maybe had been a garden and nobody kept it up these days since it was impossible to see unless you were already trespassing like this.
“Front or rear?” Rik asked now, glancing at the others as they watched.
To Hollyanne, it looked perfectly normal, but Steve had assured them that the Ministry had actually spent a lot of money specifically to maintain that illusion.
“Is that a driveway?” Hollyanne asked Jake.
Spencer pointed a 35mm camera that she presumed had a night lens on it.
“It is,” he replied after a moment. “There is a door that looks like a storm cellar, down a couple of steps on the right. Closed but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Rik, can you get a good shooting stand to cover the door?” Jake asked.
Hollyanne studied the terrain but knew that she would probably be going first through the door if they penetrated the facility.
“Maybe, but it will be crowded,” Rik replied.
“Spencer’s coming in, so it will be just you,” Jake assured her.
“Oh, then yeah,” Rik said. “On the right there, where you see that 55-gallon drum. At night, I’d look like a second one butted up against it until I moved.”
“Okay, you move there when we move forward,” Jake said. “You text Steve updates and cover our back in case we somehow got here ahead of Nathaniel. And handle any runners, like London.”
“On it.”
Rik seemed to vibrate with an energy almost as great as Hollyanne’s, but Hollyanne was always like this in those last ten seconds before she descended into flow state and began katas and combat.
“Hollyanne, you lead,” Jake said. “Spencer in the middle.”
She nodded now and rose like a fog flowing across a Scottish moor, letting that dark spot draw her like a moth seeking the opposite of flame. Hollyanne heard the others behind her, but she was absolutely one with the night.
Across the driveway and up a small sidewalk, she paused, kneeling down to look for sensors or wires hidden in the grass on either side. She didn’t expect the British government to do anything like that, nor Nathaniel, but she wouldn’t really know that they’d guessed right until something went very wrong.
Or right.
Seeing nothing, she rose again and moved forward like fog rolling in. Down two steps and into a dark spot.
Hollyanne raised a hand to pause the others.
The smell told her everything she needed, even before she saw the locking mechanism torn open and hanging by a wire.
“We’re right,” she said simply in a low voice. “Someone spray painted the cameras recently enough that the paint hasn’t dried. Plus, the locks are broken. Spencer, you’re on.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Spencer didn’t dive into combat with the others very often. By training and inclination, he was best suited to be Rik’s spotter, finding targets and watching her back.
But he was also the most experienced with electronic security systems. He knelt now and pulled a Leatherman from a pocket, flipping open the flathead screwdriver tip as a useful universal tool to do things. A pocket flash no bigger than his pinkie finger got turned on and handed up to Jake to hold while he worked.
Someone had popped the casing open with a similar tool, as it was just resting in place on tabs. Inside, they had done the same thing he was doing right now, tracing leads and looking for the signal to tell the door to open.
Stupid board, designed to be generic and installed in ten million locations. Spencer would have at least secured the outer casing with some sort of screw tip with a complicated pattern that nobody carried as part of a standard kit. The kind that you made people strip and chew up and maybe make a lot of noise to access.
But he was all about denying access to places. Whoever had budgeted for this facility had either been naturally cheap or had gotten a kickback from the installers, because they’d gone cheap in the one place you shouldn’t.
“I can open it,” he said over his shoulder. “They still in there?”
“Either they are and we’re in combat immediately, or they’re gone and we rescue hostages left behind,” Jake said now. “You get set to unlock the door, Spencer. I’ll open it. Hollyanne will go through first, then me. You come through but stay three steps back and mostly just keep us from being surprised from the rear.”
“Gotcha,” Spencer said, rising, and getting organized.
Touch the flathead here and you’ll bridge the circuit to open the locks. Probably set off an alarm, but how close would anyone be paying attention?
Jake handed him the light and moved to the door, putting one hand on the handle.
Hollyanne had gone into that place where she was a Valkyrie about to pounce on you from the night sky, but she did that.
“Counting down,” Spencer said in a low voice. “Four. Three. Two. One. Contact.”
He touched the spot and the locks thunked open. Jake grabbed the door and pulled.
Hollyanne moved.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
Hollyanne went through the open door with more noise than she wanted but understanding that the trade-off was for speed. Nathaniel would be paying attention to his perimeter if an alarm went off right now.
Anyone other than Nathaniel in charge and they’d probably have someone more or less standing just inside the door beyond to slow her down. Not that it would slow her for long, but the noise of taking someone apart might alert the others.
She’d one-punch going by and let Jake finish them. They made a good team that way.
But the vestibule was empty. Muddy boots and jackets that were hung from pegs. Hallway beyond.
The door had been on the right end of the building, looking at it from the back, so she automatically turned left and looked around the corner. Nobody in immediate sight but two doors open of the five she could see, with lights from both.
Hollyanne flipped a coin in her head and went for the door on the left as she faced them. Jake would take the right. Spencer would stay mostly back at this transverse hallway and run interference against anyone coming from the lone door on the right.
This was not their first rodeo, as Rik would have said were she down here with them.
Fast as Hollyanne was, she saw a shadow appear at the threshold to the door as she moved. Someone inside the room had stood up or moved from right to left, with an overhead light casting a shadow into the hallway.
She risked a fast glance to the right and saw what she presumed was the office that was the target of this entire operation, with another shape seated and working.
“Hey, we just got an intruder—” the man approaching the door was saying.
As soon as he spoke, she had exploded forward.
A gun appeared at the doorway, waist high as if being carried in a ready position. Glock. Large frame version. Average height male. Growling, East End accent. Baritone.
Tommy?
They reached the doorway at the same moment. Hollyanne reached out with her right hand and batted the pistol up and away with the back of her wrist using a crane form. Greater reach and she didn’t need a lot of power.
Just deflection, which was good because the man triggered a shot into the ceiling as he flinched.
Hollyanne completed the move and drove an elbow upwards and across into his side, bruising ribs and jarring the man hard as she did.
Indeed Tommy. The bulldog who was one of Nathaniel’s top thugs. Air was exploding out of his lungs already as she grabbed his right wrist with her left hand and continued the motion to lift the weapon.
His weight made a good anchor, so she caught one of his ankles with her foot and let that give her a pivot point. Hollyanne wasn’t playing nice and didn’t know how many more men and guns Nathaniel might have brought with her.
Tommy triggered a second shot into the ceiling as she punched him in the balls as hard as she could. The sound escaping the man’s mouth was pure horror, a bandsaw being ground against a steel bar and losing teeth as sparks went everywhere.
Movement beyond caused her to drop to a crouch with Tommy as he fell. Three men in the room beyond. Two appeared handcuffed or something on a couch while an incredibly tall black man rose from a chair and lifted a pistol to shoot her.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
Jake memorized the interior of the basement as he trailed in Hollyanne’s wake. She went left so he automatically crossed to the right. Two doors that would need to be secured simultaneously, with Spencer just this side of the entry hallway from the sound of his shoes on the tile floor underfoot.
Hollyanne made no sound. Jake didn’t make much.
He saw the gunman at the same time that Hollyanne did, but Jake had to stay on his side of the corridor for now. Plus, they still had surprise, at least for another moment or two.
