One
Gunterfabrik – Kreuzberg – Berlin
It took four days for them to narrow the search.
Four cold days on the streets of a stone-gray city where the spring seemed unable to take hold, the season still warring with the last overcast remains of a winter unwilling to give ground.
They got close to the target on the second night, tracking a hand-off in the U-Bahn at Alexanderplatz, but a wild scramble that saw them changing trains and sprinting down rain-slick platforms netted nothing but irritation. Their quarry – designated with the codename Treble – avoided the team with an ease that bordered on insulting.
Later, Lynx had earned hard looks when she suggested that the target had deliberately drawn them in to get the measure of the operatives sent to capture him.
Her companions reacted predictably. Gator, the stocky corn-fed ex-Ranger, took it as a personal failure on his part and spent hours staring into his coffee and squaring away his kit to hide his frustration. Buzzard, the wiry New Yorker forever pent up with nervous energy, played with his knife and pored over a map of the city. Neither man seemed to sleep that much, both always awake when Lynx rose each morning, in their dingy safe house off Karl-Marx-Strasse.
She wasn’t like them. Of average build, with dark brown shoulder-length hair, she could have blended into any crowd of tourists without making a ripple. But if you gave her a second look, meeting those sharp green eyes, you might have sensed something of the hard focus she kept hidden.
The others had been career military before their recruitment, although Buzzard was circumspect about what branch. Lynx guessed Navy, but he wouldn’t confirm or deny, and when he posed the question to her, she was equally tight-lipped. Gator decided she was former police, and she allowed him to believe that. The truth was more complex.
The secrecy – even from each other – was part of the program. Sometimes active missions meant working with people you knew next to nothing about, finding a way to mesh together into an operable unit at short notice. Hence the codenames and the lack of personal small talk. The people in charge wanted this op to be about the takedown, not a team-building exercise for agents in the field.
Lynx was fine with that. Having seen Gator and Buzzard out in the world over the past few days, she had her doubts that either man had the right mindset for collaboration.
Still, they managed to track Treble to his staging area, a victory of sorts. Lynx studied the derelict building across the street, through the windshield of their rented VW Golf, the brutalist five-story block of concrete and graffiti-covered glass rising behind a corrugated metal fence.
Against the whirl of fine rain falling from a low night sky, the place had an unlovely look to it, the typical silhouette of utilitarian East German architecture. The sign over the entrance was still visible despite decades of decay. The place had been a textile factory turning out sports kits for kids playing soccer inside the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, but that had been before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Die Wende, what the Germans called the turning point.
Lynx looked around, checking her sector for traffic, finding nothing. This whole area on the bank of the river Spree had been just inside the wall in the bad old days of the Cold War, and you could see the legacy of it in the buildings. Like a lot of Berlin’s riverside real estate, the fate of the factory would be to get gobbled up by some property developer, then razed to the ground so some new modernist construction could rise in its place. Or maybe they would keep the exterior intact, playing on its Communist-era retro chic. She wondered what the DDR stalwarts of the past would make of that. For her, those people and that time were ancient history, something that only existed in movies and documentaries.
“No visual,” drawled Gator, down low in the passenger seat with a pair of low-light goggles held to his face. He peered at the factory’s lightless windows. “Treble could be masking his signature.”
“He’s smart,” offered Buzzard, leaning forward in the VW’s backseat. He carefully screwed a long sound suppressor into the barrel of a Glock 17 pistol, before loading it with a magazine of blue-tipped bullets.
“More than you know,” noted Lynx. “He practically wrote the book on this.”
“You a fan?” Gator gave a derisive snort and a pointed look, then went on. “There’s only one of him. All you gotta do is make sure you don’t repeat the screw-up at the subway.”
“Don’t put that on me,” she said. “You’re the one that spooked him.”
“And you’re the one supposed to mark him.” Gator checked his own weapon, before stuffing it into his overcoat.
“He got past us all,” Lynx snapped. “Like I said, he’s top tier.”
Buzzard drummed his fingers on the doorframe. “So, we do this different,” he said. “The mistake was leaving him a way out at the station. This time, we split up, cut off his escape routes.”
Lynx shook her head. “Wrong. We need to come at Treble in force. It’s the only shot we have at taking him down. Remember the briefing.” The thin document that operational command had given them talked in no uncertain terms about their target’s superlative skillset, easily the equal of the best the Spetsnaz, SAS, or SEALs had to offer.
“I got my force multiplier right here.” Gator smirked and patted his gun.
Lynx pulled a face, but clearly the other two had already made up their minds, and she knew it would be a waste of her time trying to bring them around. Buzzard elected to go up the drainpipe on the west side of the factory and work his way down from the roof, while Gator would go in from the riverside. That left Lynx with the front entrance. Her scowl deepened.
Buzzard pulled up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal a device that resembled a smartphone clipped to the inside of his forearm. The screen blinked on, and he tapped it experimentally. “All right. Synchronize OPSATs.”
“Copy.” Lynx and Gator had identical tech of their own, part of a clandestine network that gave near-instantaneous communication to the chair-warmers back at command. The Operational Satellite Uplink, to give it its full name, could be slaved to a strategic mission interface for real-time tactical data exchange, but for the duration of this action, most of those functions were inactive.
The three operatives keyed in their identity codes, and their OPSATs vibrated against their skin. Next, Buzzard handed out the last items of their gear: flexible ballistic cloth facemasks and low-light monocles that fitted over one eye. Suitably equipped, with hoods pulled up over their heads, the trio became faceless.
Lynx checked her pistol one last time as Gator slipped into the rain, then she followed him out, taking care to close the door quietly. Buzzard was a step behind, a gray shape in the steady downpour.
“Comms check.” Gator’s gruff tones sounded in Lynx’s ear, relayed through a tiny radio bead inside her earlobe.
“Lynx,” she replied, her voice picked up by a dermal microphone taped to her throat.
“Buzzard.” The other man followed protocol, and from the corner of her eye, Lynx saw him dash across the empty street and vanish around a wall.
“Good copy.” At the other end of the block, Gator hesitated and threw a look in Lynx’s direction. Illuminated by the dull glow of a streetlight, he gave her the sketch of a salute and melted into the shadows.
Lynx got to the front entrance in quick steps, taking care to avoid the deep puddles where the rain collected. Drawing her weapon, she squeezed through a narrow gap in two sheets of metal fencing. A truck rumbled past, headlights briefly throwing a wash of white over the building’s tumbledown façade, and she froze, letting it pass before moving on.
She checked the edges of the door and found no sign of sensors or booby-traps. That meant Treble had either neglected to place any – unlikely, given what she knew about him – or that he’d placed them so well she couldn’t see them on the first pass.
Lynx flicked down her low-light monocle and examined the entryway more closely. As she did, she heard a grunt from Buzzard.
“Ascending.”
“Copy,” replied Gator. “At the rear door. Tripwire. Made safe.”
As he spoke, Lynx caught sight of the same thing. A nearly invisible length of line at ankle height had been placed inside the entrance vestibule, and she followed it to a primed nine-banger stun grenade, cleverly hidden under some debris.
“Same here,” she whispered. Lynx chose to leave the trap in place and stepped over it with a gymnast’s ease.
She moved slowly, steadily, spreading her weight with each footfall. A narrow and tall atrium, the entrance had a central staircase choked with rubble and broken furniture. High above, a cracked skylight allowed runnels of rain to fall the distance and spatter against the tiled floor.
Lynx stayed low, moving from cover to cover, pausing every few moments to survey her surroundings. The view through the monocle cast everything in fuzzy shades of sea-green and corpse-white, as if she was at the bottom of a lake.
She held her breath. In the distance, somewhere in the direction of Engelbecken Park, police sirens wailed, then grew faint.
In short order, Lynx moved from room to room, looking for anything that indicated Treble’s presence, coming up empty. “Ground floor, no contact,” she announced.
“Basement, no contact,” said Gator. “Proceeding to first floor.”
“Roof, no contact.” Buzzard seemed out of breath, then he corrected himself. “I mean, I found a spotter perch up here but no spotter.” He sighed. “Descending to fifth.”
“Copy.” Lynx considered that for a moment. Had Treble been up there, watching them before they made entry? She sucked in a breath of musty air, and then set off, making for the stairwell at the end of the corridor. “Proceeding to second floor.”
•••
Buzzard climbed into the building through a gap that had once held a skylight. The swollen and cracked wood took his weight, and he dropped into a cat-footed landing on damp, mold-blackened carpet. The office space he descended into was empty, everything not nailed down long gone, leaving only bare walls covered in dirt and graffiti tags layers deep. The concrete floor beneath the rancid carpet meant no creaking floorboards to betray his movements. The only sound was the rain.
Or was it?
Buzzard turned his head in the direction of a ghost of a noise. He caught an electronic mutter, like the sound of static from a poorly tuned radio. It was frustratingly indistinct, but he didn’t dare ignore it. The noise was a sign of life, and that meant they were right about Treble hiding out here.
Keeping to the shadows, Buzzard crept forward, out of the office and on to a long landing. More ruined flooring squelched under his boots, the edges of the mildewed carpet tiles curling up like decayed flower petals. He fixed his sights on the source of the sound, bringing up his pistol, resting his finger on the trigger.
Through his low-light monocle, he spotted a knife edge of illumination emerging from beneath a half-closed door a few meters away. The sound came again, clearer this time. The burble of a voice on the other end of a phone.
So Treble was in there, talking to someone. That meant he would be distracted. Vulnerable.
Buzzard hesitated, tapping his throat mike three times, the code for target sighted.
“Can you confirm?” Lynx whispered in his earpiece.
He frowned. The only way he could do that was to kick open the door and put a round in Treble’s chest. Buzzard didn’t reply. He had to be quick and quiet, or the element of surprise would be lost.
He was within arm’s reach of the half-open door when his movement triggered the proximity sensor of a device hidden under a fold of rotted carpet. In a fizzing burst, the concealed shocker released the full stun charge stored in its dense battery core, hitting the operative with punishing force.
Buzzard’s muscles locked in agony, and he toppled forward like a felled tree. His body sang with pain, as if he had been dipped in fire. His shuddering hands clutched at the air and his mouth locked open.
He heard Gator in his ear, calling for an update, but all Buzzard could do was lie in a trembling heap and scream silently as electricity shot through him.
•••
“Buzzard, respond?” Gator hesitated at the edge of the first-floor atrium, waiting for a reply that didn’t come. “Buzzard, key your mike if you can.”
“You think Treble got him?” Lynx ventured the question on both of their minds.
“Maybe.” Gator released a breath. “I’ll draw him out.”
“Bad idea.”
“Didn’t ask your opinion.” He brought the Glock close to his chest and picked a direction, moving down the corridor to his right.
The floor opened up into a grid of office cubicles with tumbledown wooden partitions. The space had high ceilings deep with shadows and Gator scanned for movement among the hanging pipework and broken ducting. Opportunistic thieves had been through here in the past, ripping up the walls and the flooring for the building’s copper wiring. The drifts of debris everywhere made it hard to move without making noise, and Gator strained to listen over the constant ticking of the rain on the grime-coated windows.
He would have been hard pressed to put it into words, but Gator had an inkling. Some sixth sense trained into him by his drill instructors at Ranger School, warning him he wasn’t alone. Treble was in here with him, he could feel it, like an itch between his shoulders.
And that meant a trap, waiting for him to put the wrong foot forward. His lip curled. That had to be what Buzzard had run into, some fake-out set by their target to thin the ranks of his hunters.
A voice in the back of Gator’s head asked him if maybe Lynx had been right all along. If Treble wanted to pick them off one by one, they had given the man exactly what he wanted.
Re-evaluating his situation, Gator started a slow retreat, moving back the way he had come, as another truck raced past down on the street. The vehicle’s headlights threw a fan of light through the windows, and for a moment the jumping shadows took on the shape of a man.
Gator fired without thinking, putting two rounds up into the dark figure. The Glock’s stifled cough echoed through the open space, and spent brass pinged off the wooden partitions, but he hit nothing.
The shadow was just that, a hazy black form that melted away as the truck carried on its journey. Gator cursed inwardly, angry at himself for letting his eagerness get in the way.
His patience waned, and he decided to even the odds. The Ranger felt for the cylindrical shape of a flashbang grenade clipped to the inside of his jacket. If Treble was in the room, it was the best way to force him into the open.
He fumbled for the grenade as a low whistle sounded from above him. Gator twisted, spinning around to bring up the gun, and he had the impression of a figure suspended in the gloom, dangling from one of the pipes.
Before he could get off a shot, the man was on him, gravity bringing them together with enough force to put the thickset Ranger down on the floor.
Gator fought to keep control of his pistol, but his assailant snaked a wiry, muscular arm around his neck and pulled him in close. Unable to call out a warning to Lynx, his air choked off, Gator’s vision began to fog as the sleeper hold took effect.
He jerked the Glock’s trigger and the shot went wild, pinging off the floor. He had the dim impression of a black-clad stalker, of rasping breath sounding near his ear. In a last-ditch attempt to break free, Gator kicked and punched, feeling his blows hit body armor.
Blood roaring in his ears, Gator desperately tried to fight back as the color bled out of his world and the shadows closed in. He pulled the flashbang’s pin in a last act of defiance – but as the cylinder rolled away from him across the floor, he had already lost consciousness.
•••
Lynx heard the stun grenade go off on the floor below her, and saw the brief flash of oxide-white light through cracks in the concrete.
In the wake of the sound-shock, she caught the crunch of booted feet moving away, and burst into motion, tracking them.
He took down Gator.
She didn’t question the thought, overlooking the sharp realization that she was now the last hunter standing. Her target was heading to the northeast corner of the building, in the direction of the river. There was a bridge that way, she remembered, and if he could get outside and across to the other bank, Treble would vanish. The city turned into a warren over there, and alone, she had no chance of tagging him.
If she didn’t stop him here inside the factory, he’d be as good as gone.
A few meters away, a rough-edged hole in the floor where part of the structure had collapsed formed a pool of blackness leading down to the level below. Lynx made her choice without hesitating, dropping into a sliding motion that took her over the edge and into the dark.
It was a risky ploy, dropping into the unknown, but she took the chance that she wouldn’t fall feet-first on to a pile of rusted rebar or another booby-trap. The drop was longer than she expected, and Lynx landed off-kilter, stumbling as she tried to recover her balance.
In the pitch dark she fumbled to adjust her low-light monocle. Everything through her right eye’s vision showed green and white. Every support pillar or fallen wall stood out, complicating her sight picture.
Treble could not have missed her entrance, and from somewhere across the open space, Lynx heard a faint click and then a high-pitched whine, like a camera flash charging.
She fired in the direction of the noise, not so much to score a hit, but more to force a reaction. Bullets sparked off the wall, and a piece of the shadows broke off and dove behind cover.
There!
Finding her momentum again, Lynx pulled herself over one of the low partitions, half-rolling, half-diving, gun close in and ready. She landed sure-footed this time, firing another two rounds into the space where Treble had gone. But he’d faded away.
She pivoted on her heel, instinct screaming at her to watch her back.
Treble had set up the three operatives to draw them close at Alexanderplatz and he had done it again. The target intuited how the team’s dynamic operated and turned that against them. Isolate and neutralize. Good tactics.
Lynx evaded the short, hard punch that came straight at her, flinching away, but not fast enough to get off cleanly. Treble’s gloved knuckles kissed her cheekbone with a glancing hit that took her monocle with it, ripping the device from her masked face.
She ducked low, bringing up her gun, but Treble slammed the heel of his hand into her solar plexus, blowing the air out of her lungs in a pained rush. Lynx staggered back a step, and Treble’s shadowy form kept coming, out of the dark and into the half-light. He reached out and snagged her wrist, bending it the wrong way. She hissed in pain and lost her grip on the Glock.
The gun fell at her feet, but Lynx had no time to think about it. Treble moved on her, firing rapid blows out of the gloom that she deflected more by the sound than by seeing them.
She tried to extend the distance, but he wouldn’t let her, keeping up the pressure, forcing her to dance to his tune.
Anger flared, and Lynx used it to fuel her, feinting right, avoiding a chopping blow aimed at her throat. She pushed in closer, moving inside Treble’s guard, and landed return blows on his belly, chest, and throat.
Her attacker growled and lost a step as he soaked up the hits, passing through a shaft of moonlight from a broken window. Lynx glimpsed a craggy, unshaven face hidden behind insect-like night-vision goggles, and a loose coat over matte black tactical gear.
She kept up the momentum, using her edge in speed and agility. Treble was easily twice her mass, and one well-placed blow from him could put her down hard. But each hit she sent his way was guesswork and instinct. Fighting in the dimness was like boxing smoke, and she couldn’t be sure if she could hold her own.
“Lynx…?” Buzzard’s voice echoed behind her, and she looked without thinking, snared by the distraction. “You there?”
The wiry young man stood in the passage, groggy and slow, supporting himself with one hand up on the doorjamb. In the weak light, he looked pale and unsteady. Whatever Treble had used to put him down, he felt the effects of it.
The target made a tsk noise under his breath and moved like lightning. He snatched the seam of Lynx’s hoodie and yanked her off balance, pulling her to him. Pressing her back to his chest, he put one arm at her throat and started the slow business of choking her out.
Part of Lynx realized that Treble had been taking his time with her in the exchange of blows, playing it out. At the same time, he had drawn a gun with his other hand, bringing it to bear on Buzzard.
Lynx tried to shout a warning, but a strangled gasp emerged from her lips.
Treble’s silenced pistol chugged, and a blue spark burst on Buzzard’s chest. He gave a cry and fell out of sight.
The instinctive action for Lynx would have been to wrestle the man’s hand away from her neck, to take a desperate gulp of air before she blacked out – but she fought down the animal panic rising inside her and felt for her only remaining weapon.
Her fingers found the black polymer combat knife tucked into a sheath-pocket at her thigh and pulled it free, twisting it around in her grip. Her blood thundering in her ears, Lynx put her energy into forcing the blade up and back, until the point pushed into the soft flesh of Treble’s throat.
She applied steady pressure against his Adam’s apple, ...
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