One of his men yanked the door open, and a soft white light spilled out of the interior, bathing the breach point in a welcoming glow.
“Frag out,” the radio crackled.
The explosion went off, muffled by the thin plywood walls, which bowed under the pressure. Three shots echoed inside, followed a moment later by three more.
“Building two clear.”
“Building three clear.”
“We need a breacher at jackpot,” Harden said.
“Moving,” came the reply.
Barnes stepped up to the top of the hill and watched the two men exit the commo shed. One of them popped a green ChemLight and dropped it at the threshold so that everyone knew the building had been cleared.
“Four’s clear.”
A loud thump rose from across the compound followed by, “Positive breach at jackpot.”
Jones grabbed the black case and began walking to the center of the FOB. Barnes took a moment to watch the sun disappear behind the mountains. The deep red and vibrant oranges stood in stark contrast to the burned and bullet-marked buildings that lay before him.
“Jackpot secure. We have the package.”
“Good copy. Anvil 6, Anvil 7, objective secure,” Harden told Colonel Barnes over the radio.
“Anvil 6 copies all,” he replied.
Barnes unbuckled his helmet and slipped the noise-canceling headset off his ears. He hated wearing helmets, and if it weren’t for the need to stay in contact with his team he wouldn’t have worn the headset either.
Placing the helmet under his arm, he headed toward building one. His boots crushed the shiny brass under his feet as he walked over a blackened divot made by a grenade.
The tan wall and tin roof of building one followed the same basic design as the rest of the black site, except that someone had spray-painted skulls on the exterior walls. Over the door someone had stenciled “The Scorpion Den” in black spray paint.
The “team room” was where SF teams spent their downtime. It was the modern equivalent of the Viking mead hall, minus the women and booze, where warriors gathered to share tales of battle and sexual conquest. A plate of food sat cooling on the table, and the last occupant had even paused the movie he’d been watching before the attack. It was an eerie reminder of the transience of life.
Jones was already inside, sitting at one of the tables with an open Toughbook computer attached to a satellite uplink. The black case sat open next to the computer and Barnes set his helmet, with the headset nestled inside, behind the case. He looked down at the metal cylinder inside with its eerie biohazard sticker on stark display.
The door to the team room swung open and Harden appeared, pushing a visibly frightened Arab in front of him.
“Mr. Hamzi, it’s good to see you again,” Barnes said as Harden forced the man roughly onto the couch. The colonel lifted the metallic tube out of the case and walked over to Harden. Jones was talking to the pilot on the radio as the Anvil Team second in command gingerly accepted the tube from his boss.
“The bird is inbound, sir,” Jones said without looking up from the laptop.
“Good. Take a team down to the village and make sure everyone masks up. We don’t want any cross-contamination.”
“Yes, sir. The perimeter’s set and I have Hoyt and Villa securing the commo shed.”
“Sounds good to me. Make sure you get the video footage.”
Harden nodded and left the room, while Barnes ran his hand through his blond hair and sighed as he walked over to the couch. Slipping the knife from its sheath, the colonel took a seat across from the Arab.
As he twisted the blade slowly in his gloved hand, the blood from the SF soldier was visible on his tan fingers. Barnes’s father had taught him that the threat of violence was usually worse than the actual act. A man’s fear was always amplified by the deep thoughts couched within his own consciousness.
As a child, he’d stolen his dad’s shotgun and snuck out to the pasture to play cowboys and Indians. Swinging the shotgun from one grazing cow to the next, he pretended they were marauding savages attacking the peaceful homestead. In an instant, his finger brushed the trigger and the twelve-gauge went off, knocking him to the ground.
Dazed, he sat up in the dirt and gingerly touched his collarbone. He thought it was broken but immediately realized he had a bigger problem as one of the cows fell to its knees, a gaping hole in its flank.
He had rushed home to hide the shotgun, but there was no way to disguise the dying cow. An hour later, his father found him hiding in the barn. His father took him out to where the cow lay bleeding out from the double-aught buckshot that had torn open its side.
Barnes hadn’t seen his dad pick up the broken piece of fence post as they walked across the pasture because he’d been too busy trying to come up with a plausible story. Suddenly, his mind was blank, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the gnarled piece of wood in his father’s hands. His tiny imagination ran full bore, quickly filling his mind with endless possibilities.
Fear had erased the carefully plotted story he’d come up with, and he confessed everything in a torrent of tears and pitiful gasps. Barnes didn’t flinch during the beating and once his father’s arm got tired, he handed the young boy a knife.
“Put her out of her misery,” he’d told him.
The same fear was now in the Arab’s eyes as Colonel Barnes leaned forward and held the blade of the knife inches from the man’s face.
“You have a choice to make,” he began, placing the blade on the man’s face and slowly dragging it down his cheek. The razor-sharp edge split the man’s skin easily, leaving a trail of fresh blood behind. “You can either sit here until I bleed you out, or”—Barnes pulled the knife away from the quivering man’s face as one of his men appeared with a satellite phone—“you can call your brother and find out where the president’s convoy is.”
The blood from the cut began dripping onto the man’s shirt. Barnes had to reach forward with his free hand and slap him across the face to snap him out of his daze. The man jumped and greedily reached for the phone.
“Before you make the call,” Barnes said, grabbing the man by the hair and twisting his neck around, “I want you to know that if you fuck this up, I am going to kill you, very slowly.”
The Arab’s face paled, and there was a rushing sound. Barnes looked down at the wet stain on the man’s crotch before letting go of his hair, and he smiled broadly.
CHAPTER 11
“Can anyone tell me what the heck is going on?” the president demanded from behind his desk.
NSA Cage stood just on the edge of the tan carpet and watched as Secretary Collins stared down at the presidential seal embossed on the floor. Instead of waiting for the rest of his cabinet, the president had jumped on Collins’s ass as soon as the two men came through the door. Cage knew that he was next, and the only intel he had was from an encrypted text from his aide, informing him that the DIA had decided against a warrant and instead launched a daylight raid against the doctor’s house.
The agents had gotten their asses handed to them, and it was all because Decklin couldn’t follow fucking instructions. The operation had resulted in a burned-down house and more than a handful of dead agents, and right now the media was having a field day.
Instead of feeling dread, Cage was suddenly optimistic. His instincts were telling him that there was an advantage to be had, if he could only figure it out in the next few seconds. He knew he had the space he needed to distance himself from the fallout and was in the midst of taking a deep breath when he noticed a man looking at him from the edge of the room.