Page 106 of Double Shot

“Boom!” He laughed.

“That guy thought so, too.” She raised her eyebrows in amusement and gave a little half-smile that stirred something inside me.

“So, once you get through the glass doors, you’ll go for the upper floor, the internal floor plan is open, and you will be able to bring down fire from above. If it gets too spicy, you can cool things down with teargas, flashbangs, or those H-E rounds you liked.”

“Too bad there aren’t set-shit-on-fire grenades.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully.

“There are, but it would take too long to smuggle them into the country,” Roan said.

“Russian?” I asked.

“Naturally,” he replied.

“God bless the Russians for being kill happy and not caring who they sell it to,” I said.

“So, you will be in through the side door like last time, Sadie will pincer and strike from above, and that should catch most of them in the middle,” Roan said, sweeping his finger along the floor plan for emphasis.

“What are you going to do?” Sadie asked.

“I’ve got an automatic shotgun and a revolver that needs to be broken in,” he said. “And I’m coming in through the front door. Grant will begin with the first strike option, shut down their power, alarms, and security system. While they scramble, the two of you will already be in motion. After they figure out they’re fucked, I’ll take out the guard shack, come in through the front, and we’ll finish this like Montgomery.”

“And I’m air support and comms,” Grant said.

“Correct, this place is recently renovated so a lot of their equipment is borderline smart, but it’s old enough that almost none of it is prepared for anything more than rudimentary cyberwarfare. You will splice into everything they have. Last time we were here, I was able to turn the lights on and off, and trigger the fire sprinklers.”

“Dude, no way they haven’t corrected that by now?” Grant asked.

“It looks unlikely, I ran a search on service tickets to the building and it looks like all they did was a ton of clean-up, body removal, and bribes to get local and federal officials to leave the place alone. I found Emerson’s signature on a few of the items, so that’s how they got the heat off of them, and this place wasn’t confiscated and made government property.”

“Do we need to deal with Emerson?” Sadie asked.

“I don’t think so. When Grant isn’t supporting us, he has the job of seeing if there is any database or servers here, get into them, and see how much of this we can blow up. It hurt them bad when I nuked Malmaison’s data, and then taking out Kaijin’s node at John Laurens’ locked her down until Worthington bailed her arse out,” he said.

“So, if this goes well, we’ll burn Emerson and everyone attached to him too?” I asked.

“That’s the plan,” he said.

“What about Worthington, what happens when we cross blades with him?” I asked. “I know you served with him.”

“I did and don’t worry about it. Worst case, he is an enemy combatant, best case, I have it in the bag.”

“How?” Sadie asked. “I’ve seen buddy action movies go bad with this sorta thing.”

“Because he owes me,” Roan said, more confident than his normal confident self.

* * *

It wasclose to midnight when we started the operation. It was sooner than planned because all of us but Grant had to walk to our starting places. The low-profile Lamborghini couldn’t be used as our personnel carrier, too obvious and no room to carry our equipment. It had been pricey getting all of this in hand, but Roan used the money we had stolen from Kaijin to pay for it, and expedite it. More dragonscale armor, Kevlar vests, helmets and gas masks, we looked like black clad storm troopers.

I checked my weapons and ammo. The others did the same, Roan inspecting his elephant blaster automatic shotgun, cowboy revolvers, and earpiece. Sadie was impatient, rolling a teargas grenade around in her hand. At least she wasn’t playing with one of the high explosive rounds, those were tucked in a thigh bandolier andGod,was that hot.

I knew the AR I had was ready to go, and so were the pistols.

We followed our designated paths, Grant tagging a drone to follow each of us, so he didn’t have to try to chase us with one, or run the risk of losing one to wind or accidentally drifting into power lines or a fence while it was idling. As we went, he was sitting in front of four monitors, and chirped us all the guidance we needed to ghost through Oasis. I reached my target first, and scanned the building through my scope, looking for heads popped up over the wall or sticking out in the guard tower on this side. There were two, maybe three, and there were no cigarette cherries glowing, no phone illumination. It was dark, aside from a few floodlights.

Sadie was the last to check in, but had the longest distance to go.

Once she chimed in, we went into action.

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