Nightstalkers (20 page)

“We’re on.”

The Snake lifted straight up.

Mac was drawn up from the roof, followed by Moms, then Nada.

Looking down, Nada was startled. He could swear there was someone on the roof of the garage attached to the house across the street from their new base of operations. But then he was airborne, twisting and turning at the end of the rope as Eagle banked the Snake to head to the FOB, the three figures dangling below the craft.

Looking back, Nada could no longer see that roof.

Deep in her room, Ms. Jones watched the half-dozen computer displays on the ceiling above her hospital bed. The proximity of Fort Bragg to this latest incident was a fortunate thing. Only sixty miles away and the home of Special Operations, she was able to
mass a superb Support Force of active duty personnel, which she preferred over contractors.

They already had an FOB set up, and more personnel and matériel were moving north in convoys and via helicopters and sling loads.

It was nice to have such high-caliber Support, but in the end it would just be the Nightstalkers versus the Fireflies.

It always was.

Eagle brought the Snake down slowly, allowing Nada to get boots on the ground first, then Moms and Mac. Once they were clear, he deployed the landing gear and settled down right on top of the blinking infrared strobe only visible through his night-vision goggles. The small clearing was set deep in a forest, over two miles from the closest house.

A cluster of Humvees, trucks, and two black SUVs were parked just inside the trees. Troops came out of the woods with camouflage nets and poles and set to work covering the Snake even before Eagle got the back ramp down.

Nada took charge, as Moms was once again listening to Ms. Jones. With Mac and Eagle’s assistance they broke the large team box down into smaller loads. The two SUVs were backed up and the cargo compartments loaded to the gills with the items Nada thought would be needed in their new Area of Operations.

Satisfied, Nada turned to Moms and waited.

She had her head cocked for another thirty seconds, then switched off. “Nothing new,” she reported. “Let’s go.”

A soldier came running up with something. Two stickers. For Senators Club. They applied them in the proper spot on the windshields. He also handed them a transmitter, one for each car.

“What’s this for?” Nada asked, seeing no buttons on it.

The soldier shrugged. “No idea. I was just told you’d need it.”

Mac got in one SUV with Eagle, and Nada took the wheel in the other while Moms took the passenger seat.

“Crap,” Nada said as they pulled out of the FOB, through a narrow dirt track in the woods, lit by chem lights set up by Support.

“What?” Moms asked.

“Civvies. We’re gonna need civvies to move around in that place.”

“We can forage. I’m sure there are a ton of clothes in the closets upstairs.”

Nada gave her a doubtful look but said nothing further. They came out of the forest and turned onto a paved, double-lane state road.

“Besides,” Moms said, “our personal civvies are as bad as wearing uniforms there. We need civvies that fit in.”

Nada repeated his dubious look.

They came to the sign indicating the turn into Senators Club, just as the GPS informed them to make the correct choice and turn. They left the state road onto a road flanked by well-manicured brick walls. There was no guard on the first gate. In fact there was no gate, just a massive, ornate sign. Another, less ornate sign informed them they were now in Senators Village. Behind the trees on either side they could see rows of townhouses.

“Is this where the help lives?” Nada asked.

“No,” Moms said. “They probably live in that trailer park we passed about a mile back. This is where the younger people who aspire to move farther in live.”

Another brick wall and a slightly better sign indicated they were now entering Senators Park. The single-family houses were
close together, a smattering of trees giving a moderate sense of privacy. They were mostly one story and small. The next level was Senators Forest, where there were more trees and the houses were larger and held claim to bigger lots. The whole place was like a canal with locks and dams, and you could only enter if you could rise to the level.

“At least they make the class structure formal here,” Nada said.

Moms shrugged. “We got a pass to the inner sanctum and we have a job to do.”

They went through a two-hundred-yard belt of trees, the outer buffer for the inner sanctum of Senators Club. The guard on the gate waved them through, only focused on the sticker and not able to see the occupants through the tinted windshield. “Ms. Jones will have Support take over the security,” Moms added.

“Just have to make sure they don’t get curious and poke into our mission.”

“Ms. Jones will ensure that.”

“Won’t the locals notice they got new security?” Nada wondered.

“People who live in places like this don’t focus much on the hired help,” Moms said, “even the ones with guns.”

Despite the fact they were now in Senators Club proper, it turned out Doctor Winslow had purchased a house that required another passage. A metal gate blocked the way and there was no guard to wave them through, just a sign that said Senators Ridge. Nada slowed down, trying to figure this out, when the transmitter they’d been given beeped and the thing swung ponderously open.

“They got more gates here than Bragg,” Nada said.

There were twenty-four houses along the ridge in four rows of six. It was the highest point around, allowing the occupants to
look down on all the others who were scrambling to try and reach this status. The houses also had great views of the surrounding forests and artificial lakes dotted here and there, and the golf course.

“Who lives there?” Nada asked as he drove through, nodding toward a large structure in the middle of a field surrounded by a white fence that stretched for half a mile.

“Horses,” Moms said, spying one of the beasts. “It’s a stable.”

“Geez,” Nada muttered. “The horses live better than the people in Senators Village.”

Thus Nada and Moms and Mac returned, with Eagle, to Senators Club in the late hours of the night, the time when people skipping out on the mortgage usually drove off in the opposite direction. The SUVs screamed government anywhere else, but not here, where SUVs were the vehicle of choice, the bigger the better. Except these vehicles weren’t carrying soccer balls or traveling baseball bags and a half-dozen screaming kids.

The smug voice of the GPS wound them through a warren of curving streets. Each one looked almost exactly the same: hulking houses with square footage in five figures.

“Didn’t the architect of this place know how to draw a straight line?” Eagle wondered over the team net. “And what’s with the lights pointed in, not out?”

The amount of brick and stone and stucco and wood and granite and slate was staggering, and Eagle was correct: exterior lights, unlike at a firebase pointing out to highlight the enemy, were all pointed inward to display each house in case someone was blind and could miss the monstrosities.

“Landscaping is all too close to the houses,” Nada observed. “Good cover for anyone trying to break in.”

“They all have security systems,” Moms said.

Mac snorted. “The cheapest rent-a-cops you can buy and the cheapest system, I bet.”

“They did put a lot of money into the gates and fence,” Nada admitted.

As they pulled up into the driveway of the Winslow place, two of the four garage doors opened, indicating Roland was on his game, as expected. As they stopped, the doors slid down behind them.

Roland was standing in the doorway leading to the house.

Everyone got out and opened the cargo doors on the SUVs. Mac, Eagle, and Roland started unloading. Kirk was upstairs providing over-watch.

“There’s stuff in the kitchen,” Roland was saying, “that I don’t even know what they’re for.”

“They’re called appliances,” Moms said.

“There’s drawers with wires and weird machines,” Roland continued, giving his account like he would after having pulled recon on a high-priority high-tech target he needed an Acme to decipher for him.

“Dishwashers, warming ovens, trash compactors, and stuff like that,” Moms said as she started helping the others as Nada stood on top of the stairs leading into the mudroom, taking over-watch just in case they got attacked by a weed whacker. “Might be a good place to stash some weapons. Just don’t push any buttons,” Moms warned.

“I didn’t see any buttons,” Roland said.

“Just stay away from them then,” Moms said. The last thing they needed was for their weapons to get a rinse and hold.

They trooped inside carrying a bunch of gear they might need sooner rather than later. Mac went off to check the security system and Roland went back upstairs to pull over-watch with
Kirk. A few minutes later they heard a crash of something and Roland cursing. He came over the net.

“There’s a room full of just dolls and clowns and dollhouses and stuff like that. It’s freaking me out.”

Moms and Nada exchanged a glance. Roland never got freaked out on a mission. But this was different. The house represented something so foreign to her team that she could see dismissal was turning to intimidation, and that wasn’t too far from uneasiness. And, ultimately, fear, although she couldn’t see anyone on this team going there. But then again, Burns had lost it in the Fun Outside Tucson because of a cactus. Everyone had something buried deep from some childhood trauma that could get to them, a reality Moms knew very well. For Roland, apparently it was dolls and clowns.

Moms spoke over the net. “It’s just a house. A very big house full of lots of stuff. Most of it is for looks. Like the baby grand near the front door.”

It was on big brass wheels and Nada immediately turned it from decoration to usefulness by rolling it over to the large front double doors and shoving it against them, then locking the wheels.

Moms nodded approvingly. “See? Nada blocked the front door with the piano. We use what we need for our mission. Improvise, people. It’s what we’re good at.”

“What’s the point of having stuff just to look at?” Roland wondered from upstairs, staring at who knows what. Moms knew he could see the point of looking at naked women dancing on some tables: that made sense. A piano? Vases as tall as the cactus from Tucson? Clowns and dollhouses? No.

“Mac?”

“Yo.”

“The house security system. Bypass the code so we can run it.”

“Already working on it.”

“And then set up your own cameras to give us a three-sixty view and put the displays in the room overlooking the front yard. That will be over-watch central. And then tie in to the Senators Club system so you can see everything their cameras see.”

“Roger.”

“Kirk?”

“Yes?”

“Hook your satellite retransmitter to the dish on the roof. I saw one when we STABO’d off. I want to ensure our com-link is secure. Then steal into Senators Club wireless so Mac can bootleg their video and all other commo. And I want us to monitor that even after Support takes over.”

“Roger.”

Nada tapped her on the arm. “It’ll be dawn in a bit. I’m going to do a perimeter search inside the Wall. Make sure we didn’t trap anything inside that’s trying to get out.”

Moms nodded, but pointed at his MP-5 and his MK-23. “Suppressors.” She hit the net. “Everyone, go suppressed.”

With a sigh, Nada quickly screwed on the bulky suppressors for both weapons. His sigh was because the suppressors required special rounds, which were less effective than normal bullets. He pulled the magazines in both guns, ejected the rounds in the chambers, then removed magazines marked with a piece of red tape from the specific ammo pouch on his combat vest where everyone on the team carried their subsonic ammunition.

The bulky tubes were not silencers. Anyone who was anyone who used weapons knew silencers only existed in movies. A gun makes a lot of noise in a lot of different ways. The moving parts
make noise. The gunpowder going off and blowing out the end of the barrel makes a rather large noise. The crack of a round going through the sound barrier makes a supersonic crack. The best one could do was keep the gun well lubed to reduce the first noise; have a suppressor on the end of barrel to eat up the expanded gases from the gunpowder explosion to reduce that sound to a minimum; and prepare special bullets that were subsonic to avoid the last.