“Right.” She nodded, gripping her HK417 reflexively as she fell into step behind him.
The others, save for Hale, had landed within six hundred and fifty feet, so getting the team together only took a couple of minutes. They gathered together, perching on a dirt berm that had been piled up by construction equipment, and looked toward the town to the east of them with some interest.
“Damn. Nothing. I’ve got nothing,” Masters said finally. “You guys?”
Keyz shook his head. “From what I saw on the way down, the whole place looks dead, ’cept for the lights. Thing is, boss, it’s a small town, and it’s nighttime, right? That could be normal?”
“Normal?” Norton scoffed. “Am I the only one who sees that fire burning over there? Someone should be putting it out.”
“Good point,” the explosives expert conceded.
“No one sees any sort of guards, patrols, whatever?” Masters asked, overriding the conversation.
“Negative.”
He nodded, accepting the consensus before thumbing his throat mic. “Hale. Report.”
Nathan finished cutting himself loose, roughly folding the silks up into a pad that he unceremoniously wrestled his kit bag onto. The school rooftop he’d chosen to land on wasn’t the best spot he could have hoped for, but unfortunately the area didn’t have many high-ground spots with decent cover, so he’d chosen the best of a bad lot.
He unpacked his Barrett M82-A1, special-application scoped rifle (SASR), which he fondly called Sassy, smoothly unfolding the bipod and settling it down along the building’s peak as he lay prone on his chute. He flipped open the caps protecting his scope optics, and when he peered through it and into the apparently deserted small town, the darkness was transformed to a grainy green daylight.
“Hale. Report.”
Nathan casually reached up and flicked open his comm, speaking softly but clearly into the throat mic.
“I’m down and in position. Town’s deserted,” he said. Then he rested his rifle on the roof as he pulled a pair of light-intensifier binoculars from his kit, using them to scan the area. “Guard C-130 is still on the strip. Looks intact. No movement.”
“Roger. We’re coming your way. Maintain position and take overwatch.”
“Wilco,” Hale said. “Overwatch is mine.”
Trudging through the half-frozen muck, the team kept their pace deliberately slow as they listened for any sign of movement or machines. The massive earth berms and creepily shimmering chemical pools did nothing to set any of them at ease, but that was just fine by Masters as he led them around the tracks made by the oil company’s earth-moving machines. Nothing about this mission put him at ease, so what was one more thing on the list?
The town of Barrow was northeast of their position, and they could see the lights between the berms of earth as they moved. Like everything else about this mission, however, the silence was beginning to unnerve them.
“I’ll take any guesses you have as soon as you have them, Alex,” Masters spoke softly.
“Haven’t seen anything to change what I already said, Hawk.” Alex shook his head. “Give me something more to work with.”
“In a few more minutes, I expect you’ll have that.”
Judith Andrews frowned, her eyes darting over to Alex as they continued to move through the slushy muck. “Just what is your specialty, anyway?”
He smiled at her. “Let’s just say that I’m a real wiz in more fields than one.”
She rolled her eyes at the complete lack of information, though she didn’t miss Rankin and Masters’s carefully suppressed laughter.
They paused behind the last berm that separated them from the town, Masters checking the map under a shielded and red-filtered light.
“All right, that’s Apayauk Street there.” He nodded in the direction of a dirt-and-gravel road that had obviously seen better times — most of the team had seen better-looking cart roads in third-world countries. “There are some small houses and buildings right on the coast, just ahead. I don’t see their lights, but we’ll head there first. Clear?”
“Clear,” the others answered, save for Alex and Judith, who merely nodded.
“Let’s go.”
They broke cover and sprinted across the road, sinking past their boots in places where the freeze-and-thaw cycles had completely chowdered the road, continuing over the embankment and onto the frozen beach, where they crossed a secondary winter road. From there, they turned toward the town again and slogged along the coast another three hundred feet until they were behind the houses that had been identified by Masters.
Resting briefly after climbing back up to the level of the town from the beach, they scanned their surroundings again, but still couldn’t find anything moving.
This time, however, a thermal scan of the closest buildings did turn up something new for them to consider.
“Heat signs in the closest building, boss,” Mack Turner pointed. “It’s well insulated, but there’s leakage around the windows.”
Masters took the thermal scope and checked the scene for himself. Mack had been right, of course, but it could just mean that the heat hadn’t been turned off. It probably did mean that, actually. Unfortunately, unlike in the movies, thermal scopes didn’t look through walls unless they were pretty much stripped of insulating properties.
Still, they’d have to clear the buildings, one by one if need be, before moving on.
“Mack, you and Derek take point,” he ordered. “Eddie, Keyz, and Andrews, you follow them in. I’ll take drag position.”
“Right.”
“Roger.”
They climbed the rest of the way up and sprinted for the building, sliding into low crouches under the closest window as the two on point kept their HK417 rifles raised to their shoulders and aimed at the window.
Rankin, Keyz, and Andrews covered the corner of the building while Masters dropped into a crouch beside Alex, who was looking rather annoyed, marginally miserable, and more than a little wet and cold.
“You okay?” Masters asked.
“I’ll live,” Alex replied in a quiet voice. “I don’t want to show off until we know what the hell is going on here.”
Masters nodded. “Right. Hang here while we clear the building.”
“I won’t argue with you on that.”
Masters crawled forward, nodded to the two point men, and gestured around the corner. They nodded in response and broke from the window as Masters took up their position, then went around the corner, ducking low as they took up positions on either side of the door.
A silent count of three was the only warning they gave before Derek mule-kicked the door with enough force to splinter the wood around the locking mechanism and send it slamming inside. A scream was heard from within, but almost before it could be heard Mack was through the door, sweeping the area with his 417 assault rifle.
“Get down! Down! Down!” he snarled, his eyes automatically taking in the people in front of him.
Masters put his elbow through the window, then followed it with the muzzle of his Beowulf fifty-caliber rifle, adding his own commands into the mix. “Face down on the ground! Now!”
Within seconds the team had stormed the building, physically throwing several people to the ground. One of the men had to kneel on a man’s back when he tried to get up. Literally less than a minute passed before silence returned, and not a single shot had been fired.
“Clear,” Derek Hayes called softly. “Civilians, boss. Shotguns, rifles, nothing milspec…but I’m just as happy they didn’t have them ready.”
“Roger that,” Masters said as he fell back from the window and pulled Alex to his feet, heading around to enter the building.
Inside, the team had several men and women lying in a row on the floor, rifles pointed at their heads.