Page 48 of Peace Under Fire

“I’ve got a team enroute to the place Mandy told us about. ETA, four hours.”

“Okay.” Squish waited. Tex’s voice sounded off. Hell, he couldn’t pinpoint what was different, but something was wrong. He exchanged concerned glances with Brick. “There a problem?” he asked after a moment of intense, disturbing silence.

“The camera feed at Mandy’s compound’s been cut,” Tex said. He hesitated, before continuing abruptly. “But I managed to recover some of the feed’s recordings.”

“Okay.” He waited, what had Tex’s normally sunshiny personality in a twist? The video? The compound?

“Whoever set the cameras up buried the feeds on an encrypted server on the dark web.”

“And?” Squish prompted when Tex abruptly stopped talking again.

Something sure had the dude tweaked. His voice had become tighter and higher the longer he talked. Considering what the dude had seen during his time on the SEAL teams, as well as his time as a contractor and fixer, you’d think he’d become desensitized to fucked up situations.

Squish couldn’t remember him ever sounding so creeped out.

What had those cameras captured?

“The assholes that attacked the compound are unrecognizable. Covered in black tactical clothing from head to toe. Black masks. Black boots. Not one damn patch of skin on display, at least, in the beginning.” Tex paused to take a deep breath. “Someone from offsite took down the electrical grid. Once the current was down, they rammed through the front gate in a Humvee. Two more Humvees followed the first in.”

Three vehicles? That seemed like overkill. Or maybe not, if Mandy hadn’t exaggerated what her sisters were capable of. Some of those abilities would turn the women into weapons.

Tex’s voice went tight and tense again. “Three teams bugged out of their vehicles as soon as they reached the buildings and hit the structures with multiple blasts from stripped down versions of an RPG gun. It looks like the force generated by the grenades were less than a full RPG blast. Enough to punch holes through the concrete, but not enough to bring the walls down.”

Which made sense. The bastards didn’t want to kill the women, they wanted to grab them. And full RPG blasts would be too dangerous in that case, killing anyone who was within a certain vicinity. A stripped-down grenade meant less damage, which meant less death.

“The assaults punched multiple holes through the concrete walls. At which point they shot some kind of cartridge through the holes. Not long afterwards, a vaporous substance seeped out the holes in the concrete,” Tex continued.

“Knockout gas?” Squish frowned. Now that was odd.

Sleeping gas wasn’t nearly as reliable as fiction implied. Without the exact dose tailored to the specific victim, the gaseous substances commonly used were as likely to kill, as they were to have no effect at all. The military had tested various gasses with disastrous effects before giving up on that method of subduing the enemy.

“Yeah, some kind of knockout gas is my guess. The bastards who moved in were all wearing gas masks.”

“So, they knocked the women out with some kind of gas and went in and collected them,” Brick said. “But that makes no sense. There were multiple women in the building. They couldn’t have tailored the doses to the individual women if they’re dispersing the gas from a distance. They must have used a universal dose. But that’s incredibly inaccurate and foolhardy—particularly if they want the women alive, yet unconscious.”

Squish nodded in agreement. “The only way gassing them would work is if they’re using something new, a chemical that affects everyone equally.”

And shit, the military would pay billions for such a formula. If a substance like that had been developed, Special Operations would have access to it. Which meant the bastards who’d stormed the compound weren’t some elite factions of the military. Whoever was after Mandy and her sisters must be private contractors. And well-supplied ones at that.

“I’m having the reconnaissance team test the air for foreign substances. If the gas hasn’t dissipated, maybe we can identify the chemical they used.” Tex’s voice had gone tight and high and squirrelly again.

Enough of this pussyfooting around. “What about this has you so tweaked?”

“Yeah,” Tex coughed, and Squish could hear him trying to regulate his breathing. “I’m sending the footage from the outside camera to Brick’s phone. There’s more video from other cameras, but I’m limiting the file to the eye-popping stuff. You won’t believe what’s on that video, not unless you see it with your own eyes. Fuck—” He let out a long shaky breath. “I’ve watched it a dozen times and I’m still not sure I believe it. I’m running an analysis to see if it was faked.” He paused long enough to catch his breath.

“Hell, I’ve got to see this.” Brick glanced over his right shoulder, flicked on his right blinker, and pulled onto the freeway off-ramp.

“Just sent the attachment,” Tex said, his voice all business now. “Let me know once you’ve watched it. I need to check in with the reconnaissance team.” The line went dead.

While Brick exited the freeway and found a place to park on the street below, Squish found the dude’s text message app and located Tex’s message. There was one attachment without commentary. As soon as Brick parked the SUV along the treelined road, Squish played the footage.

The video opened with swirling snow. Three black, extra-large Humvee’s appeared, surrounded by thick, fat snowflakes. They closed in on three concrete buildings, leaving wet, dark tracks in their wake. Squish frowned. Where was the camera located? It wasn’t on any of the buildings. Mandy had said the compound consisted of three concrete buildings—and there were three buildings in view. He shifted his attention back to the insert team.

The approaching vehicles looked intimidating. Bulky, with expensive upgrades—like tinted windows and a winch on the front and back grills. They were moving fast, flinging snow up behind them in a thick, fluffy white cloud. They spread out maybe a hundred feet from the camera with two of the vehicles pulling up in front of the biggest building, and the third Humvee stopping farther north between the two smaller buildings. The doors opened and men dressed in black tactical garb swarmed out. Half the men split off and headed to the right and left of the main building, apparently circling it. The rest of the men used the vehicles as shields, crouching behind the armored Humvees. They were all carrying weapons—some with what looked like slimmed down versions of RPG launchers and others that looked like pistols, but with modified muzzle inserts that accommodated thick, short canisters. The gas guns and attached canisters didn’t look like anything he’d seen before, or even heard of.

The video was without sound. The only way you knew the RPG weapons had fired was by the jerk of the muzzle and the brief flare against the white haze coming down. Huge chunks of the concrete buildings crumbled. There were multiple discharges before the gas guns popped up and started firing their canisters through the crumbling holes in the concrete buildings.

Squish frowned. Nothing weird so far. What had Tex been reacting to?

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