Final Target

Book 9: Jonathan Grave Thriller

by John Gilstrap

Genres: Action & Adventure; Political Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

“Rocket-paced suspense.”—Jeffery Deaver “Gilstrap will leave you breathless.” —Harlan Coben “A great hero, a really exciting series.” —Joseph Finder Freelance operative Jonathan Grave faces his fiercest challenge yet in bestselling author John Gilstrap’s explosive new thriller . . . The mission: Drop into the Mexican jungle, infiltrate a drug cartel’s compound, and extract a kidnapped DEA agent. But when Jonathan Grave and his partner, Boxers, retrieve the hostage and return to the exfil point, all hell breaks loose. Ambushed, abandoned, and attacked on all sides, their only hope of survival lies inside a remote orphanage where innocent children have been targeted for death. Even if Grave can lead his precious cargo to safety across a hundred miles of treacherous jungle filled with enemies, he can’t shake the feeling that something bigger is at play. A vast conspiracy of international power players who take no prisoners—and leave no survivors . . . “When you pick up a Gilstrap novel, one thing is always true—you are going to be entertained at a high rate of speed.” — Suspense Magazine “If you like Vince Flynn and Brad Thor, you’ll love John Gilstrap.” —Gayle Lynds “Gilstrap pushes every thriller button.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Release date: June 27, 2017

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 428

Sample

Jonathan Grave heard the sounds of ongoing torture a full minute before he arrived on the scene. An approach like this in the middle of the night through the tangled mass of the Mexican jungle was an exercise in patience. He was outnumbered and outgunned, so his only advantage was surprise. Well, that and marksmanship. And night vision.

Ahead of him, and too far away to be seen through the undergrowth, his teammate and dear friend, Brian Van De Muelebroecke (aka Boxers), was likewise closing in on the source of the atrocity.

The last few minutes, the last few yards were always the most difficult. Until now, the hostage’s suffering had been an academic exercise, something talked about in briefings. But hearing the agonized cries above the cacophony of the moving foliage and screeching critters of this humidity factory made it all very real. The sense of urgency tempted Jonathan to move faster than was prudent. And prudence made the difference between life and death.

It was 2315, the night was blacker than black, and that victim, who no doubt was praying for death, had no idea that he was mere minutes away from relief. As soon as Jonathan and Boxers got into position, they would read the situation for what it was and then execute the rescue. It would be over in seconds. There was nothing elegant about what they intended. They would move in, kill the bad guys who didn’t run away, and pluck their precious cargo—their PC, a DEA agent named Harry Dawkins—to safety. There was some yada yada built into the details, but those were the basics. If past was precedent, the torturers were cartel henchmen.

First, Jonathan had to get to the PC and get eyes on the situation. He had thousands of years of human evolution working against him. As a species, humans don’t face many natural predators, and as a result, we don’t pay close attention to the danger signs that surround us. Until darkness falls.

When vision becomes limited, other senses pick up the slack, particularly hearing. As he moved through the tangle of undergrowth and overgrowth, Jonathan was hyper-aware of the noises he made. A breaking twig or the rattle of battle gear would rise above the natural noises of the environment and alert his prey that something was out of the ordinary. They might not know what the sound was, but they would be aware of something.

Alerted prey was dangerous prey, and Jonathan’s two-man team did not have the manpower necessary to cope with too many departures from the plan.

Another scream split the night, this time with a plea to stop. “I already told you everything I know,” Dawkins said in heavily accented Spanish. The words sounded slurred. “I don’t know anything more.”

As Jonathan neared, the magnified light of his night-vision goggles, NVGs, began to flare with the light of electric lanterns. “I have eyes on the clearing,” Boxers’ voice said in his right ear. He barely whispered, but he was audible. “They’re yanking the PC’s teeth. We need to go hot soon.”

Jonathan responded by pressing the TRANSMIT button on his ballistic vest to break squelch a single time. There was no need for an audible answer. By their own SOPs, one click meant yes, two meant no.

As if to emphasize the horror, another scream rattled the night.

Jonathan pressed a second TRANSMIT button on his vest, activating the radio transceiver in his left ear, the one dedicated to the channel that linked him to his DEA masters. The transceiver in his right ear was reserved for the team he actually trusted. “Air One,” he whispered over the radio. “Are you set for exfil?”

“I’m at a high orbit,” a voice replied. “Awaiting instructions.” The voice belonged to a guy named Goodman, whom Jonathan didn’t know, and that bothered the hell out of him. The pilot was cruising the heavens in a Little Bird helicopter that would pluck them from one of three predetermined exfiltration points. He was a gift from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as an off-the-record contribution to their own employee’s rescue. For reasons that apparently made sense to the folks who plied their trade from offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, this op was too sensitive to assign to an FBI or even a U.S. military rescue team, yet somehow it could support a government-paid pilot, and that inconsistency bothered Jonathan. A lot. It was possible, of course, that Goodman was every bit as freelance as Jonathan, but that thought wasn’t exactly comforting. Freelancers’ loyalty was as susceptible to high bidders as their skills were.

“Be advised that we will be going hot soon,” Jonathan whispered.

“Affirm. Copy that you’re going hot soon. Tell me what you want, and I’ll be there.”

Jonathan keyed the other mike. “Big Guy, are you already in position?”

Boxers broke squelch once. Yes.

Jonathan replayed Dawkins’s plea in his head. I already told you everything I know. The fact that the PC had revealed information—even if it wasn’t everything he knew—meant that Jonathan and Boxers were too late to prevent all the damage they had hoped to. Maybe if DEA hadn’t been so slow on the draw, or if the U.S. government in general had reacted faster with resources already owned by Uncle Sam, the bad guys wouldn’t know anything.

The bud in Jonathan’s left ear popped. “Team Alpha, this is Overwatch. Over.”

“Go ahead, Overwatch,” Jonathan replied. He thought the “over” prefix was stupid, a throwback to outdated radio protocols.

“We have thermal signatures on Alpha One and Alpha Two, and we show you approaching a cluster of Uniform Sierras from roughly the northwest and southeast.”

Somewhere in the United States, Overwatch—no doubt a teenager, judging from his voice—was watching a computer screen with a live view from a satellite a couple hundred miles overhead. As Jonathan wiped a dribble of sweat from his eyes, he wondered if the teenager was wearing a wrap of some kind to keep warm in the air-conditioning. “Uniform Sierra” was what big boys wrapped in Snoopy blankets called an unknown subject.

“That would be us, Overwatch,” Jonathan whispered. He and Boxers had attached transponders to their kit to make them discernible to eyes in the sky. Even in a crowd, they’d be the only two guys flashing “Here I am” signals to the satellite.

“Be advised that we count a total of eight Uniform Sierras in the immediate area. One of them will be your PC. Consider all the others to be hostile.”

In his right ear, Boxers whispered, “Sentries and torturers are hostile. Check. Moron.”

Jonathan suppressed a chuckle as he switched his NVGs from light enhancement to thermal mode and scanned his surroundings. It wasn’t his preferred setting for a firefight, because of the loss of visual acuity, but in a jungle environment, even with the advantage of infrared illumination gear, the thick vegetation provided too many shadows to hide in. “How far are the nearest unfriendlies from our locations?” he asked on the government net.

A few seconds passed in silence. “They appear to have set up sentries on the perimeter,” Overwatch said. “Alpha One, you should have one on your left about twenty yards out—call it your eleven o’clock—and then another at your one, one thirty, about the same distance. Alpha Two, you are right between two of them at your nine and three. Call it fifteen yards to nine and thirty to three. The others are clustered around a light source in the middle. I believe it’s an electric lantern.”

Jonathan, Alpha One, found each of the targets nearest to him via their heat signature and then switched back to light enhancement. Now that he knew where they were, they were easy to see. The concern, always, was the ones you didn’t see.

As if reading his mind, Venice (Ven-EE-chay) Alexander, aka Mother Hen, spoke through the transceiver in his right ear. “I concur with Overwatch,” she said. The government masters didn’t know that Venice had independently tapped into the same signal that they were using for imagery. She was that good at the business of taming electrons. He liked having her second set of eyes. While he knew no reason why Uncle Sam would try to jam him up, there was some history of that, and he knew that Venice had only his best interests at heart.

On the local net, Jonathan whispered, “Ready, Big Guy?”

“On your go,” Boxers replied.

Jonathan raised his suppressed 4.6-millimeter MP7 rifle up to high ready and pressed the extended buttstock into the soft spot of his shoulder. He verified with his thumb that the selector switch was set to full auto and settled the infrared laser sight on the first target’s head. He pressed his TRANSMIT button with fingers of his left hand and whispered, “Four, three, two . . .”

There was no need to finish the count—it was the syntax that mattered. At the silent zero, he pressed the trigger and sent a two-round burst into the sentry’s brain. Confident of the kill, he pivoted left and shot his second target before he had a chance to react. Two down.

From somewhere in the unseen corners of the jungle, two more suppressed bursts rattled the night, and Jonathan knew without asking that the body count had jumped to four.

Time to move.

Jonathan glided swiftly through the undergrowth, rifle up and ready, closing on the light source. The fight was ten seconds old now. If the bad guys had their weapons on them and were trained, they could be ready to fight back.

An AK boomed through the night, followed by others, but Jonathan heard no rounds pass nearby. Strike the training concern. Soldiers fired at targets; thugs fired at fear. Barring the lucky shot, the shooters were just wasting ammunition.

Jonathan didn’t slow, even as the rate of return fire increased. His NVGs danced with muzzle flashes. The war was now fifteen seconds old, the element of surprise was gone, and that left only skill and marksmanship.

Three feet behind every muzzle flash there resided a shooter. Jonathan killed two more with as many shots.

And then there was silence.

“Status,” Jonathan said over the local net.

“Nice shooting, Tex,” Boxers said through a faked Southern drawl. “I got three.”

“That makes seven.” With luck, number eight would be their PC. “Mother Hen?”

Before Venice could respond, the teenager said, “Alpha Team, Overwatch. I show all targets down. Nice shooting.”

Jonathan didn’t bother to acknowledge the transmission.

“I concur,” Venice said. She could hear the teenager, but the teenager could not hear her. Of the two opinions, only one mattered.

Jonathan closed the distance to the center of the clearing. A naked middle-aged man sat bound to a stout wooden chair, his hands and face smeared with blood, but he was still alive. Dead men surrounded him like spokes of a wheel. This would be their PC, Harry Dawkins, and he looked terrified.

“Harry Dawkins?” Jonathan asked.

The man just stared. He was dysfunctional, beyond fear.

“Hey, Dawkins!” Boxers boomed from the other side of the clearing. At just south of seven feet tall and well north of 250 pounds, Boxers was a huge man with a huge voice that could change the weather when he wanted it to.

The victim jumped. “Yes!” he shouted. “I’m Harry Dawkins.”

As Jonathan moved closer, he saw that at least two of the man’s teeth had been removed, and with all the blood, it was hard to verify his identity from the picture they’d been given. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” Jonathan asked.

The guy wasn’t patching it together.

“Focus,” Jonathan said. “We’re the good guys. We’re here to take you home. But first we need to know your mother’s maiden name. We need to confirm your identity.”

“B-Baxter,” he said. The hard consonant brought a spray of blood.

Jonathan pressed both TRANSMIT buttons simultaneously. “PC is secure,” he said. Then he stooped closer to Dawkins so he could look him straight in the eye. He rocked his NVGs out of the way so the man could see his eyes. Dawkins hadn’t earned the right to see Jonathan’s face, so the balaclava stayed in place. “This is over, Mr. Dawkins,” he said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

Boxers busied himself with the task of checking the kidnappers’ bodies for identification and to make sure they were dead.

The kidnappers had tied Dawkins to the chair at his wrists, biceps, thighs, and ankles using coarse rope that reminded Jonathan of the twine he used to tie up newspapers for recycling. The knots were tight, and they’d all been in place long enough to cause significant swelling of his hands and feet. Three of Dawkins’s fingernails were missing.

Jonathan loathed torture. He looked at the bodies at his feet and wished that he could wake the bastards up to kill them again.

“Listen to me, Harry,” Jonathan instructed. “We’re going to need your help to do our jobs, understand? I’m going to cut you loose, but then you’re going to have to work hard to walk on your own.” It was good news that the torturers hadn’t made it to his feet yet.

Jonathan pulled his KA-BAR knife from its scabbard on his left shoulder and slipped its seven-inch razor-sharp blade carefully into the hair-width spaces between rope, skin, and wood. He started with the biceps, then moved to the thighs. The ankles were next, followed last by the wrists. Dawkins seemed cooperative enough, but you never knew how panic or joy was going to affect people. The edge on the KA-BAR was far too sharp to have arms flailing too early.

“Who are you?” Dawkins asked.

Jonathan ignored the question. A truthful answer was too complicated, and it didn’t matter.

“Listen to me, Harry,” Jonathan said before cutting the final ropes. “Are you listening to me?”

Dawkins nodded.

“I need verbal answers,” Jonathan said. After this kind of ordeal, torture victims retreated into dark places, and audible answers were an important way to show that they’d returned to some corner of reality.

“I hear you,” Dawkins said.

“Good. I’m about to cut your arms free. You need to remain still while I do that. I could shave a bear bald with the edge on this blade, and I don’t need you cutting either one of us up with a lot of flailing. Are we clear?”

Dawkins nodded, then seemed to understand the error of his silent answer. “Yes, I understand.”

“Good,” Jonathan said. “This is almost over.” Those were easy words to say, but they were not true. There was a whole lot of real estate to cover before they were airborne again and even more before they were truly out of danger.

The ropes fell away easily, and in seconds, Harry Dawkins was free of his bonds. Deep red stripes marked the locations of the ropes. The man made no effort to move.

“Do you think you can stand?” Jonathan asked. He offered a silent prayer with the question. He and Boxers were capable of carrying the PC to the exfil location if they had to, but it was way at the bottom of his list of preferred options. He glanced behind him to see Boxers continuing his search of the torturers’ pockets, pausing at each body long enough to take fingerprints, which would be transmitted back to Venice for identification.

“I think I can,” Dawkins said. Leaning hard on his arms for support, he rose to his feet like a man twice his reported age of forty-three. He wobbled there for a second or two, then took a tentative step forward. He didn’t fall, but it was unnerving to watch.

“How long had you been tied to that chair?” Jonathan asked.

“Too long,” Dawkins said with a wry chuckle. “Since last night.”

Jonathan worked the math. Twenty-four hours without moving, and now walking on swollen feet and light-headed from emotional trauma, if not from blood loss.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen.” Venice’s voice crackled in his right ear. “Emergency traffic.”

Air One beat her to it: “Break, break, break. Alpha Team, you have three . . . no, four victor-bravo Uniform Sierras approaching from the northwest.” Vehicle-borne unknown subjects.

“If that means there are four vehicles approaching your location, I concur,” Venice said. She didn’t like being upstaged.

Jonathan pressed both TRANSMIT buttons simultaneously. “I copy. Keep me informed.” He turned to Boxers, who had heard the same radio traffic and was already on his way over. Jonathan opened a Velcro flap on his thigh and withdrew a map. He pulled his NVGs back into place and clicked his IR flashlight so he could read. “Hey, Big Guy. Pull boots and a pair of pants off one of our sleeping friends and give them to the PC. The jungle is a bitch on the delicate parts.”

“What’s happening?” Dawkins asked.

Jonathan ignored him. According to the map—and to the satellite images he’d studied in the spin-up to this operation—the closest point of the nearest road was a dogleg about three-quarters of a mile from where they stood.

“Alpha Team, Air One,” Goodman transmitted from the Little Bird. “The vehicles have stopped, and the Uniform Sierras are debarking. I count eight men in total, and all are armed. Stand by for map coordinates.”

Jonathan wrote down the minutes and seconds of longitude and latitude and knew from just eyeballing that the bad guys had stopped at the dogleg.

“Air One, Alpha,” Jonathan said. “Are the bad guys walking or running?”

“I’d call it strolling, over.”

“So, they’re not reinforcements,” Boxers said, reading Jonathan’s mind. He handed a pair of worn and bloody tennis shoes to Dawkins, along with a bloody pair of baggy khaki pants.

“I’m guessing shift change,” Jonathan said.

“What, people are coming?” Dawkins had just connected the dots, and panic started to bloom.

Jonathan placed a hand on Dawkins’s chest to calm him down. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ve got this. Put those on and be ready to walk in thirty seconds.” To Boxers, he said, “Let’s douse the lights. No sense giving them a homing beacon.” It was a matter of turning off switches.

With the lights out, Dawkins’s world turned black. “I can’t see anything,” he said. His voice was getting squeaky.

“Get dressed,” Jonathan snapped. “You need to trust us. We’re not going to leave you, but when it’s time to go, you’re going to need to move fast and keep a hand on me. I won’t let you get lost or hurt.”

“Are we gonna fight them?” Boxers asked. He was ever the fan of a good firefight, and his tone was as hopeful as Dawkins’s was dreadful.

Jonathan pressed his TRANSMIT button. “Air One, Alpha. Give me the bad guys’ distance and trajectory. Also, are they carrying lights?”

“I show them approximately three hundred meters to your northeast, still closing at a casual pace. They have white light sources. I’m guessing from their heat signatures that they’re flashlights, but I can’t be certain.”

Jonathan didn’t want to take a defensive position and have a shoot-out with a bunch of unknowns. It wasn’t the risk so much as it was the loss of time. In a shoot-out, it’s easy to identify the people you’ve killed, and if the wounded are yellers, they’re easy, too. It’s the ones who are smart enough to wait you out that you have to worry about. When he was doing this shit for Uncle Sam, he could remove all doubt by calling in a strike from a Hellfire missile. Sometimes he missed those days.

Waiting out a sandbagger could take hours, and their ride home—the Little Bird—didn’t have hours’ worth of fuel.

“We’re going to skirt them,” Jonathan announced.

Boxers waited for the rest.

Jonathan shared his map with Big Guy and traced the routes with his finger. “The bad guys are coming in from here, from our two o’clock, a direct line from their vehicles, which are here.” He pointed to the dogleg. “We’ll head due north, then double back when we hit the road. If we time it right, we’ll be on our way in their truck before they even find this slice of hell.”

“We’re gonna pass awfully close,” Boxers observed.

“Fifty, sixty yards, probably,” Jonathan said. “We’ll just go quiet as they pass.”

“And if they engage?”

“We engage back.”

“And we’re doing all of this with a naked blind man in tow,” Boxers said.

“Hey,” Dawkins snapped. “I’m right here, and I’m dressed.” He’d even helped himself to a bloody shirt.

“No offense,” Boxers grumbled.

“Let’s go,” Jonathan said. He moved over to Dawkins, taking care to make noise in his approach so he wouldn’t startle the guy. “Hold your hand out, Harry,” he said.

The PC hesitated but did as he was told.

“I’m going to take your hand,” Jonathan said as he did just that, “and put it here in one of my PALS loops.”

“Your what?”

“They’re attachment straps for pouches and other stuff,” Jonathan explained. “Stuff you don’t need to worry about. You think of them as finger rings.”

Dawkins yelped as he fitted his wounded fingertips through the tight elastic. “Hurts like shit.”

“Better than dyin’,” Boxers observed.

No response. None was needed.

“Okay, here we go,” Jonathan said, and they started off into the night. He keyed both mikes simultaneously and relayed their plans. “I want to know if anybody wanders off or drifts toward us. My intent is not to engage. But more important than that is not walking into an ambush.”

“I copy,” the Overwatch teenager said. “I’ll let you know if I see anything.” Jonathan noted that that was the first they’d heard from Snoopy for a while.

For three, maybe four minutes, they moved as quietly as they could through the thick underbrush. The approaching bad guys were so noisy and clueless that Jonathan’s team could have been whistling and not been noticed. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, all that talking and jabbering stopped. The beams turned in their direction, painting the jungle with a swirling pattern of lights and shadows.

Jonathan and Boxers took a knee, and Dawkins followed.

“What’s happening?” Dawkins whispered.

“Shh,” Jonathan hissed.

The bud in his right ear popped. “Break, break, break,” Venice said. “The other team seems to be turning in your direction.”

Jonathan’s stomach knotted. This was wrong. Why would they do that? It was almost as if they’d been informed of Jonathan’s presence.

He keyed the mike to the Little Bird. “Air One, Alpha,” he whispered. “How are we doing?”

No reply.

“Alpha, Overwatch. You’re doing fine,” Snoopy said in his left ear. “You’re close to the approaching hazard, but they are staying to their course.”

“That’s a lie!” Venice declared in his right ear. “They’re closing on you.”

“Air One, do you concur?” Jonathan asked. Goodman was silent.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice said. “I smell a trap.”

“So it looks like we’re going to have a gunfight, after all,” Boxers said with a chuckle on the local net. “Maybe two if the dickhead in the sky is trying to get us hurt.”

“Stay low,” Jonathan whispered to Dawkins. “As in pretend you’re part of the dirt.” As he watched his PC press deeper into the undergrowth, he shuddered at the misery of both the nature and the locations of the insect bites the guy was going to sustain.

“It looks like they’re hunting for us,” Boxers whispered over the local net. When operations went hot, it was a good idea to keep all communications electronic. Not only was it easier to hear and be understood, but it also kept Venice dialed in from her command post in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia.

Indeed, not only did the approaching bad guys seem to be looking for them, but their beams were facing in exactly the right direction.

“Mother Hen, Scorpion,” Jonathan whispered on the local net. “How much distance between us?”

“Call it seventy-five yards,” she said. “But it’s a ragged line. The farthest is probably one hundred yards.”

Jonathan had a laser range finder that would tell him exact numbers, but this was point-and-shoot range. “Does every bad guy have a flashlight?”

“Affirmative,” Venice said. “At least it appears so.”

“Air One or Overwatch, tell me what you see,” Jonathan said on the government net. It was a test.

They were both gone.

“I want that kid’s name and address,” Boxers whispered over the local net. “We’re going to have a serious discussion when this is over.”

Jonathan folded the stock and foregrip of his MP7 and slid it into its holster on his left thigh, then slid his slug 5.56-millimeter M27—a Marine Corps modification of a Heckler & Koch HK416 carbine—into a shooting position. “I’m switching rifles,” he whispered for Boxers’ benefit.

“Way ahead of you,” Big Guy replied. Boxers’ rifle of choice was an HK417, a portable cannon chambered in 7.62 millimeter. Each of their weapons was outfitted with the best in night optics. “How close are we going to let them get?”

“Inside fifty yards,” Jonathan whispered. Even the heavier bullets from these more powerful rifles could be knocked off course if they hit a twig somewhere between the muzzle and the target. The closer the range, the less that would matter. On the flip side, the closer the range, the less of an advantage provided by superior marksmanship.

“How many people do you count, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked over the local net.

“Eight.”

“Mother Hen?”

“I concur. Eight.”

“That’s what I’ve got, too,” Jonathan said. “I’ll take the four on the left, full auto. In three, two . . .”

On the count, Jonathan pressed his trigger. His M27 chattered as he raked the muzzle from the leftmost edge of the line to the center, sending thirty rounds downrange in three seconds. The foliage danced under the assault of pressure and projectiles, and his targets all fell. As the bolt locked back, Jonathan fingered the mag release and allowed the spent box to fall while he pulled a spare from its pouch on his vest. He pressed it into the mag well, slapped the bolt shut, and was ready for more.

“Moving forward,” Jonathan said. “Switching to thermal. Mother Hen, watch for movement.” While humans had a hotter signature than foliage, spilled blood had a hotter signature still.

“I’m on your right,” Boxers said. It no longer made sense to whisper.

Jonathan’s world had changed from shades of green to shades of silver and black, and as he moved swiftly through the undergrowth, he had to fight the dizziness that came with the panoramic distortion. His adversaries had shown their amateur side again, and he wanted to capitalize on their—

“Movement!” Venice said over the net. “Big Guy, to the front and slightly left.”

Jonathan refused the urge to shift his eyes to mind Boxers’ business. He had his own slice of battlefield to worry about, and there was plenty for him to do. Big Guy fired a burst of four without slowing his stride.

“Hit,” Venice said. “He’s still.” At the end, there was a hollowness to her voice. Presiding over this kind of shoot-out took an unspeakable amount out of her, but she never blinked from doing the job she did not enjoy.

Jonathan and Boxers slowed in unison as they approached the blood-splashed foliage. As Jonathan saw his four bodies and their brightly shining wounds, he switched back to light enhancement mode. Head shots all around. There’d be no surviving those.

“All of mine are sleeping peacefully,” Boxers said over the local net.

“Ditto,” Jonathan said. Off the air, he added, “Hey, Big Guy. Let’s get prints and photos of these guys, too. Take five or six minutes to do it. Then we’ll use their trucks to get to Exfil One.”

“You know he’s not there, right?” Boxers said.

“I don’t know anything until I see it.” Jonathan pivoted to face the night behind him, and he called, “Harry Dawkins! You can get up now. It’s safe.”

In the distance, at the effective edge of his night vision, Jonathan saw the man rise from the undergrowth. Dawkins moved hesitantly, nervously. Of course, Jonathan thought. The PC’s world was black.

“I’m popping a light stick,” Jonathan said over the local net. To Dawkins, he shouted, “Hold where you are. Don’t get hurt.” He reached into a lower left pocket on his vest and found one of the four light sticks he carried. Nothing exotic, they were the same sticks anyone could pick up at a hardware or sporting goods store. He ripped off the aluminized wrapper, bent the stick to release the reactive chemicals, and then he shook it. In seconds, Dawkins’s world was illuminated in the same green hues that Jonathan and Boxers saw through their night vision.

“You’re safe,” Jonathan said. He walked back to meet the PC halfway. “I know this has been traumatic, but—”

“Please don’t patronize me,” Dawkins said. “I’ve done time as a door kicker myself. I understand the whole dead versus alive thing.”

Behind him, Jonathan could hear Boxers laughing. Big Guy admired anyone who understood the whole dead versus alive thing.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice said over the air. “Be advised that the satellite feed has gone away.”

Jonathan stopped short. “Gone away? What does that mean?”

“Are you talking to me?” Dawkins asked.

“No,” Jonathan said. “If I’m talking to you, you’ll know I’m talking to you.” Over the local net: “Go ahead, Mother Hen.”

“Who’s Mother Hen?” Dawkins asked.

“Quiet!” Jonathan barked.

“It means that the screen went blank,” Venice sa