Nightstalkers (9 page)

She looked back down at her Protocol. “
Keep a positive attitude
. Except when something has to be wet. Then you get nasty.” Kirk opened his mouth to ask, but she was quicker to the answer. “We’ve got three levels of missions here as determined by Ms. Jones. Dry, damp, and wet. Dry is something to be contained and further studied. So we want whatever it is intact.

“Damp is it’s to be contained, and if you can’t contain it intact, then you can break it.

“Wet is it’s to be contained by being utterly destroyed. Fireflies and Rifts are always wet.”

She had said the last without looking down. She glanced at the page once more to find her place. “
Discipline and accountability stays inside the Nightstalkers
. We are ultimately accountable only to the survival of the human race.”

Kirk blinked.

Moms looked him in the eye. “That’s no bullshit, okay?”

Kirk nodded.

“
Be on time
.” She frowned. “I need to reorder those two.”

“I told you that last time—” Nada began, but she waved him silent.

“
Keep your mouth shut about the team when outside the team
. Or Roland will pay you a visit.”

“And it will be a wet experience,” Nada added.

“
Follow Protocols
,” Moms said. “Even the smallest ones. And I, actually Nada, will be ripping Mac a new one for sneaking two extra beers while we’re technically on call.” Moms smiled. “And last but not least, keep your sense of humor. You’re going to need it.” She closed the book and raised her eyebrows. “Any questions or concerns?”

“No, Moms.”

Moms sat back in her seat and gestured for Nada to begin.

The team sergeant got up and picked up the top binder. “Nuclear Protocol, including facilities, materials, weapons, etcetera.” He tossed it to Kirk, who caught it. Nada picked up the second binder. “Biological Protocol. There are some nasty bugs out there, and hard as it is to believe, there are people in labs trying to make nastier ones. It’s not like Mother Nature can’t be quite the motherfucker by herself.” He tossed the second binder. Third binder: “Chemical. Really, you do need to read all this stuff, ’cause Doc or an Acme might not be by your side. Pretend you’re in graduate school for things that can kill. Learn which ones kill quickest and fastest.” He paused. “You know your three Bs, right?”

“Breathing, bleeding, broken,” Kirk said, listing the priorities for triage.

Nada nodded. “For us it’s the three Cs. Containment is the first priority. Nothing else matters if whatever shit we’re trying to deal with spreads. Then concealment.” He noted Kirk’s surprised look. “Panic can kill as much as the actual problem. Word of some of the things we’ve had to squash gets out, people
will go bonkers. The people out there in the world got twenty-four-hour news channels. They’re hungry for bad shit, like the way weathermen pray for hurricanes to hit so they can stand on that pier with the wind howling around them. The news would eat up the stuff we deal with and the public would panic.
War of the Worlds
–type shit. The third C is control. That one is regulated by Ms. Jones’s directive whether it’s dry, damp, or wet. Got it?”

“Containment, concealment, control.”

“Good.”

Nada picked up a stack of three more binders. “This is just a bunch of stuff. And some of it is pretty weird. They list every single mission the Nightstalkers have been on since it was founded in 1948. Makes for great late-night reading.”

Moms cut in for the first time. “Don’t concern yourself so much with the problems, because some of them won’t happen again, but look at the way the team dealt with it and consider possibilities.”

Nada dumped the three binders on top of the ones already in Kirk’s lap.

He grabbed the thickest one off the desk. “This is the one I call the Dumb Shit Scientist Protocol, but don’t ever let Doc hear that. This lists all the incredibly dumb things scientists have done that damn near wiped out the human race.” Nada’s eyes shifted to the wall between the CP and Ms. Jones’s office, as if she could hear through two feet of steel-reinforced concrete. “Pretty high up on that list is what happened at Chernobyl.”

Last, Nada tossed a pocket-sized team Protocol. “That’s your first priority reading. You’ve got forty-eight hours, then anyone can ask you anything in it and you’d better know it and your place in whatever it is.

“There’s a locker with your gear on it. Check it, but don’t move anything around. I assume in the Rangers you had standard operating procedure for the way everyone rigged their gear, right? So you can grab anyone’s vest or ruck and know exactly what’s in it and where it is? We do the same.”

Kirk nodded, remembering pulling blood-and-viscera-drenched magazines out of a dead squad mate’s vest during a particularly nasty firefight.

Nada sat back behind his desk and pulled out his own team Protocol. “Moms’s Protocol is page one. Mine is page two.” He hummed something as he scanned the list. “Let me give you some of the more important ones.” His finger slid down the page. “
Nothing is impossible to the man who doesn’t have to do it
.” He looked up. “Ms. Jones usually keeps the politicians and the press and the various government agencies off our backs during a mission. But every once in a while someone sticks their beak in. Gotta ignore ’em or they’ll get you killed.” He looked back down.

“
Smith and Wesson beats four aces
.”

Kirk smiled, having heard Uncle Ray say the same thing.

Nada wasn’t smiling. “We go in packing heat and we’ve got heavy stuff on call. We can bring hell down if we need to. Don’t hesitate. Err on the side of containment rather than collateral damage. You ever see those movies where that couple manages to escape those nasty government agents trying to contain a government screw-up because they’re so fucking special?”

Kirk nodded.

“They ain’t special. If we’re containing something, there’s a reason. We kill those people if we have to. No one gets out alive. Got it?”

Kirk nodded.

“We’ve never had to nuke anything to contain it,” Moms added.

“Yet,” Nada said.

“It’s a miracle we’ve made it this far without another nuke having to be used, one way or the other,” Moms said. “But we can call in a nuke strike if the problem warrants it and Ms. Jones concurs with her superiors.” She nodded at Nada. “Please continue.”

“
The latest information hasn’t been put out yet
. What I mean by that is we rarely get a chance to plan a mission like most Spec Ops do. ST-6 ran rehearsals for the Bin Laden hit for months before going in. Neato and nifty keen if you can. But when we get Zevoned, it’s wheels up in thirty minutes and then it’s Moms on the sat link with Ms. Jones and we develop the plan en route. We almost always HAHO or HALO”—he paused, glanced at the badge on Kirk’s fatigue shirt, and nodded—“a recon man in first. Because even with the best intel, we usually have no clue what we’re dealing with until we get eyes on the target and then boots on the ground. So you’ve got to be prepared to adapt quickly or die.”

He read on. “
There are two types of scientists: the steely-eyed killer and the beady-eyed minion and it’s hard to tell them apart
. The latter can get you killed. I don’t think I’m paranoid”—it was Moms’s turn to snort—“but keep as close an eye on any Acme Asset as you do the problem. Sometimes they can dick it up even worse than it is.

“We love Doc as one of us,” Nada said, “but even his brain starts thinking of the wonders of science sometimes before he faces the reality of the danger. He got snakebit in the shoulder on our last op and didn’t even notice until we told him.” Nada raised an eyebrow. “The snake had a Firefly in it.”

Nada slid his finger down the page, reluctantly skipping some of the ones he’d accrued over the years for sake of expediency and focus. “
They give these people guns?
Besides the scientists, sometimes you got locals on scene. Their guns don’t know the good guy from the bad guy. We parachute in and then come in on the Snake—you’ll meet the Snake later, it’s pretty cool—we scare the shit out of people. We’ve been shot at by supposed friendlies. So no one is friendly except another member of the team until we have containment.”

Nada snapped the Protocol shut with a snap and put it back in his pocket. He looked Kirk in the eyes. “This last one is key. No matter what Doc or an Acme says, my bottom line is this:
Just tell me how to kill it
.” Nada smiled and stood, along with Moms. “Well, I think that’s a pretty good introduction, don’t you?”

Kirk staggered to his feet, burdened with binders. “Uh, yeah. I’ll get to work—”

He was cut off as the phone on Moms’s desk starting playing a tune: “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

“That’s a Zevon,” Nada said as he ran toward the door, his phone also now playing the tune and the PRT chiming in a second later.

Despite the very slight time delay, they were all in sync.

The rusted sign pointing toward the old corrugated barn had a dozen old bullet holes in it and one could barely make out the faded lettering in the dark:
SEE ALL THE POISINUS SNAKES 75cents
. Eagle was driving the blacked-out Humvee using night-vision goggles, because Eagle always drove, and Roland was singing “Lawyers, Guns and Money” while manning the fifty-caliber machine gun in the roof turret because Roland always sang that when they headed to the Barn holding the Snake and he always manned the fifty. Whom Roland hoped he could shoot out here in the middle of the Ranch was something that wasn’t even worth asking. One never knew, but someone had to stand in the hole because it was pretty crowded inside the Humvee. Moms was in the passenger seat, head hunched over, speaking on a secure line to Ms. Jones.

Roland got to his favorite, slightly altered lines—“
Send lawyers, guns and money, Moms, get me out of this
”—as Nada flashed his security badge at the two guards who popped up out of hide holes, automatic weapons at the ready, night-vision goggles on, and red lasers aiming dots on Eagle and Moms. Those dots also designated a target for a Hellfire missile remotely mounted somewhere out there in the darkness. If the guards pulled their triggers
or their monitors went dead, the Humvee would be a smoking hole in the ground.

The two contractors had seen the team more than enough times to know who they were, but Protocol was somewhere between cleanliness and godliness for Nada, so they peered at the badge, then leaned into the Humvee and flashed the retina scanner at the team jammed inside, Eagle lifting his goggles momentarily for the check.

“What if one of us isn’t who we think we are?” Eagle asked, because Eagle always asked questions like that. He received no answer as the guards waved them through.

Eagle gassed—technically dieseled—the Humvee and they raced toward the Barn doors, which looked like they were ready to fall off, but were actually two-inch-thick reinforced concrete and steel and could take a direct hit from an RPG and pretty much ignore it—pretty much like the team ignored most of Eagle’s observations about the universe.

The sensor above the door picked up the transmitter in the Humvee and the doors ponderously swung open. Red night-lights flickered on inside, preserving the night vision of those not wearing goggles and keeping Eagle’s and Roland’s NVGs from overloading. Eagle didn’t slow and they slipped through the still-opening doors with less than an inch to spare on either side, and not one of the others—except Kirk, who’d never been with Eagle on a drive—had a moment’s worry that Eagle would crash them.

Eagle slammed the brakes and spun the wheel, skidding the Humvee around to the side of the Snake. Moms was still on the link to Ms. Jones, occasionally nodding or asking a question. As Nada carefully watched, the team loaded the craft with a quick, well-honed routine, Kirk bumbling along as best he could, mostly trying not to get in the way.

Except nothing was routine for Nada, so he had taken out his acetated Nightstalker Protocol, checking off the twenty-three items in the pre-op load Protocol. He’d erase the checks when they got back, in order to be ready for the next mission.

If they got back.

Moms signaled with her free hand to Nada, still listening to Ms. Jones on the sat phone.

“We’ve got a Courier gone black near Salt Lake City.”

“Package?” Nada asked.

Moms shook her head. “Don’t know yet.”

Roland pointed Kirk toward his area. It was packed and ready to move, and he grabbed the rucksack containing the portable satellite radio, along with a freshly generated set of codes that were spilling out of a printer next to the ruck.

Then he helped Mac carry the heavy plastic demolitions case into the cargo bay and secure it next to the larger team box that stayed in the Snake at all times. That box held a wide variety of gear, from climbing ropes to arctic clothing to chemical/biological protection suits, parachutes, dry suits, spare radio batteries, two million in gold coins for barter, etc. etc.; someone with an extremely paranoid and inventive mind had packed it.

Nada was always bitching it was missing a lot of stuff they were gonna need.