part0012

Hatch awoke as the Gulfstream slowed and descended, and the ride got a little bumpy. She’d slept most of the flight. She looked out the window. Dark storm clouds choked the moonlight as hard rain pelted the plane's exterior and streamed along the window. The lights on the wing reflected off the wisps of clouds they raced through.

Cruise sat across from her and was jotting something into a digital tablet. Without looking up, he spoke in a whisper. "Been a long time since I've fallen asleep next to you."

"I hope you weren't drawing me while I slept." Hatch referenced their favorite movie, Titanic. They’d watched it together at an old movie house after grabbing a couple tacos and Tecates from a food truck. That memory hadn’t come to her in a very long time. Its return felt conflictingly good, the warmth of which spread across her body.

"I'm no Jack Dawson but take a look." Cruise remembered that night, too. He turned the pad to Hatch. On it was a mission plan tactical diagram for their three-man assault team. "What do you think?"

"What happened?" Hatch studied the diagram.

"They eluded law enforcement. Anchorage's Gang Task force had information that The Way use a camp in Breakneck as a meth lab." Cruise tapped the pen and the hand drawn tactical plan dissolved into an aerial map of an ice-covered glacier. She could make out a few structures. "Welcome to Camp Hope. This is a live feed from a drone the FBI sent up. We're patched in."

"Any movement down there?"

"We've visually identified six. Buck Mathers, Sam Kirkland, Frank Winslow, Todd Lankowski, Chris MacIntosh, and our guest of honor, Walter Grizzly." Cruise flicked through a series of still shot images capturing the men named. Hatch committed them to memory.

"Any sign of Lawson?"

"No. This place was designed to be one of those escape-to-nature camps; leave everything behind. No cell reception, nothing. It had been abandoned for years, but it wasn't until a few months ago that Grizzly and his crew started using it as their clubhouse for misfit rejects. The camp's cafeteria has been converted into a meth lab. That's where we believe Lawson is. It’ll be our target location. I'd prefer to do a couple of run throughs first but it’s a simple smash and grab. Plus, clock is ticking on Lawson if it hasn't already expired."

"The op is a go? You guys are taking the lead on this?"

"Still on standby for now."

"No, we're not.” Tracy opened the door to his stateroom and joined them. “The order just came through."

"If this is a hostage crisis of this magnitude, how come local SWAT aren't handling the call?” Hatch asked. “Why call a government contractor when you could deploy the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team?"

"You ever have one of those days where everything that could go wrong did?" Tracy asked.

"More than I care to admit,” Hatch replied.

"Well, this is the mother of all days. Locals, with federal support, are handling a child abduction that turned into an armed barricade. The other factor is resources. Anchorage can't deploy units two hours south. Especially with all the recent seismic activity." Tracy scanned his team. "And HRT has been called up. Just got off the phone with my good friend Cal Roe, team commander. He's just been informed through his chain of command that his team will serve as back up. He called me to… express his frustration." Tracy's smile returned and with it his accent. "To put it bluntly. He was downright pissed. But he'll get over it."

The Gulfstream bucked as it descended another hundred feet or so.

"I still don't understand how a government contractor can supersede a federal agency unless—" Hatch let the words trail off while her brain connected the final dot. "Because you are a federal agency. But why the smoke and mirrors? Why present yourself as something you're not?"

"Subterfuge,” Tracy said. “It allows us a broader scope access point nationally and internationally. It also allows us to be the big bad contractors when things break bad. To the public and pretty much everybody else, we exist but don’t exist. Just like your Task Force Banshee. There's no record of it even existing on any of your military records. Sure, there're breadcrumbs, but only if you know what to look for."

"What makes this incident worse than the one with the child taking place in Anchorage?” Hatch said. “Sounds like that's pretty volatile."

Tracy took a moment to compose his answer. "I'd like nothing more than to save every man, woman, and child. But the reality and the ability are far out of touch. What I can do is handle the task I'm given and deliver results with unprecedented precision."

"I think you misunderstood me. I was asking what factors put Talon on the call list?"

"Exposure. The federal government can't handle another Waco. It would bring the country to its knees."

"How do Talon's methods make them better than a team like HRT? That team is chock full of former members of the spec ops community. This is going to sound bad, but what makes you guys any better?"

Hertzog joined the group and theatrically feigned taking an arrow to the heart. Taylor shadowed him. It provided Tracy a chance to redirect.

"Right now, there’s one heat signature that hasn’t moved,” Tracy said. “It’s in the center of that room. We believe that’s Lawson, and he is still alive. This one will be a full erasure."

"What’s an erasure?" Hatch thought of the briefing like this that must have been conducted before coming to the backwoods of her childhood home.

"Basically, we go in, and after the mission is complete, we erase any trace we were ever there."

Hatch couldn’t believe what she was hearing. "You're talking about military black ops on US soil."

"It happens every day.” Tracy offered a shake of his head. “The world doesn’t see it. Because we don't let them."

"If we ever wanted to retire, we could take Vegas by storm with our magic act." Cruise laughed as he zipped up the side of his combat boots.

Hatch thought about her own life and the way her past had been rewritten.

"Your show, your briefing." Tracy took a seat beside Hatch.

Cruise brought the hand drawn digital sketch up on his tablet. "Here’s the plan. We’ve got two front doors here and a front side porch. We've got an outhouse to the right, and as we work our way around on the right-hand side, there’s a side entrance. And then, in the back with a kitchen that has now been converted into a meth lab, there is another entrance. Two doors in the front, one on the side, one in the back. Four ingress and egress points. We are going to use two of them, and we’ll capitalize on the third."

Using the digital pad, he drew a sloppy version of what he had just described. His wraparound porch was fully drawn, and he scattered some trees around further out and marked in a box "OH," for outhouse. "This is the proximity going around twenty meters or so outside of the cafeteria. This is what we’re working with. No trees to provide cover. The outhouse is the only thing close. Further down are the cabins."

Cruise transitioned the image to the live feed, as he had done with Hatch. "This is a glacier, so the going won't be easy. The Suburban we'll use can’t make it over the ice. Plus, it would be impossible to mask the noise of a vehicle that heavy crunching ice. There is one road in and one road out of the camp. Two miles from the main entrance is an ATV trail that breaks off to the right. Here." Cruise scrolled the image down. The mud trail branched out from the main road. "The ATV trail leads several miles north to the base of the glacier. We're going to make the trek in on foot from there. Once we cross this icy ridge, it flattens. The camp is in the center. We walk in, hit 'em and forget 'em, then walk back out."

"More like skate back out," Hatch said.

"Not with these babies." Cruise pushed out his boot. To Hatch, they looked like any other cold weather boot. Cruise then pressed a button on the side. A metallic click sounded, and six steel claws popped out from the sole, four equally spaced on either side. The other two were centered, with one being positioned near the toe and the other near the boot's heel.

"Retractable crampons?"

"Yup. Ginger got the idea from those Heely shoes his kids wear. Had our design team build them to spec for an op a while back. They work like magic. They're lightweight and grip the ice. Each claw is a bunch of thin blades close together. They cut into the ice like a warm knife through butter. The blades make lifting the foot easy. But the best, no crunching. These boots enable us to move whisper quiet across the ice."

"We spare no expense here at Talon." Tracy chimed in. "Not trying to be used-car-salesman pushy, but I brought you along so you could see what we do. These boots are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the technology and weaponry at our disposal. If you can dream it, our research and design team can make it."

"Just wait until we hit the ground."

"You talked about erasure. All I'm seeing is an assault plan. Am I missing something?"

Cruise tapped his screen. His diagram drawing came to life.

The animated sketch identified each of Cruise's team dots on the screen by the first initial of their last name. Cruise and Taylor would enter through the side door while Hertzog entered the rear. Dynamic entry with multiple entry points. Overwhelming force with precision execution. Bread and butter close quarters combat stuff. A walk in the park for guys like Cruise and his team. Hatch had no problem with the plan itself. She would have planned something similar. It was what the team did after the diagram show that caught her attention.

"Am I reading that op plan correctly? You're using explosives?" Hatch stared at the words burn it down, written in Cruise's sloppy handwriting.

"We're gonna make a little boom boom with these." Hertzog opened his rucksack that looked more like a fanny pack in his gargantuan hands. Inside were a bunch of grenades. She recognized the M34 White Phosphorus Smoke Grenade. Her father had several. He kept them more as memorabilia than anything else.

"Why are you using Willie Pete on your way out?"

"Like you said, we're going to burn 'em all . And that is the candle." Cruise smiled.

"I still don't understand why you'd use a Vietnam era grenade to do the job."

"Talon doesn't only handle the operation. We handle the complete show." Tracy sipped hot coffee while he spoke. "And the biggest beast to control is the media. We've been able to operate with such anonymity for so long because of our ability to do just that.”

"What's the spin with the M34s?"

Cruise did his best impression of a news anchor. "The headlines will tell of a group of unstable white supremacist meth pushers who holed up in an abandoned campground with a cache of weapons dating back to Vietnam. A gun battle erupted between the members of the gang during which an old satchel of smoke grenades exploded, killing all but one. FBI’s HRT arrived shortly after to find Deputy Marshal Lawson was the sole survivor, saved by an overturned table which shielded him from the blast."

"Remind me to have you write my obituary," Ginger snarked.

"Thoughts or questions?" Tracy asked more to Hatch than anybody else in the room.

"I definitely see why Talon operates under the radar."

"We help people in trouble. And we deliver swift justice on the way out."

"Problem with swift justice, what happens when you get it wrong?" Hatch thought of herself.

"I know you're still raw about what happened to you. I know I sure as hell would be." Tracy laid his accent on thick. "But do you see anything about this group of douchebags that warrant a second thought? The Way's motto is ‘Follow me or die’.”

"I'm just saying. Make sure you measure twice, cut once," Hatch said.

"I'm glad you mentioned that. There's one member, a Christopher MacIntosh, who's new. Only been with them for a couple weeks. His parole officer is meeting us in Breakneck and I want you to talk to him."