Brad Taylor - Enemy of Mine

He returned two hours later, a statuesque young Lebanese woman in tow. He’d convinced her to have a nightcap of coffee, although she’d said she didn’t have time to stay long.

As soon as the door closed, he leaned in and kissed her. When she tried to pull away, he clamped a hand on the back of her neck. She broke free and slapped him hard across the face.

He rubbed his red cheek, getting aroused at the exchange. Wanting to push it further. “That’ll cost you a little foreplay. Fuck the coffee. Take off your clothes.”

She attacked him in fury, using her nails as claws. He blocked her amateurish attempts and slapped her hard enough to knock her down.

From the floor, her anger dissolved into abject fear.

“A fighter,” he said. “I like that in a woman.”

Jennifer flipped through the channels on the ancient television, but without cable all she picked up were local Beirut stations speaking Arabic. She turned it off and glanced at her watch for the umpteenth time. Still a half hour before hit-time.

Footsteps in the hallway outside her door caused her to quit breathing. She glanced at the abaya dress she’d carelessly thrown on the bed, calculating how long it would take her to get it back on. When the footsteps receded without a knock on her door, she exhaled, wondering yet again how she had been talked into this. Pike had said there was no way they’d do a frontal assault into the Hezbollah communications node, but he hadn’t mentioned that the alternative was Jennifer infiltrating the place by herself.

After getting picked up at the marina by Samir, they’d conducted a complete mission analysis of the communications facility from his house. Using all of the data the case officer could supply, which was considerable, they searched for a weakness.

Situated above an electronics store that took up the whole bottom floor, there was only one way to access the top three floors: a stairwell in the back. The store operated as a legitimate business, but all of the people working there were Hezbollah, and half were armed.

The computer in question was in an office on the third floor, surrounded by other offices. The server farm occupied the second floor, and the case officer was unsure what was on the fourth floor.

The building had a small alley on the left and right that ran about seventy meters deep before dead-ending into a wall. The case officer had assured them that there was no secondary entrance. The building to the left was an apartment complex, the one to the right some sort of mix of residences and offices.

Initially, it had looked like there was simply no way to infiltrate the place. Anyone entering the electronics store would be under immediate scrutiny and completely unable to enter the offices in the back that accessed the stairs. Trying to skip the first floor and enter through the second, using a ladder in the alley, was out as well, since the server-farm windows were all heavily barred. They kicked around the idea of bringing a ladder in that would reach the third floor, then realized they were talking insanity.

They toyed with a concept of coming through the roof, but since the asset could give no information on the fourth floor, they tossed it aside. That option would simply be blind.

In the end, it was Pike who’d made the connection. Jennifer remembered his question, and the chill it gave her. What about going from building to building? Work your way around the ledge on the third floor?

The men had all started analyzing the photos of the exterior, seeing the six-inch shelf that went from the buildings to the left and right, around through the alley wall, and across the target. She had known where this was going. With her acrobatic skills, they would expect her to make the climb. She silently waited for someone to say this idea was also insanity. Instead, Samir read a sign in Arabic on the apartment building and stated they were advertising openings.

Pike had looked at her then, a question on his face he didn’t need to verbalize. She said, “I can’t get in an apartment there! Come on, I’m a Caucasian female.”

Samir said, “Nobody would know if you wore an abaya with a niqab veil covering your face. Just keep your eyes downcast to hide their color. You’ll look like every other pious Muslim woman.”

“Who’ll get me in? What if someone asks me a question?”

Pike said, “One step at a time. Let’s contact the case officer and see if his asset can rent an apartment on the third floor facing the building.”

She felt sick to her stomach at the thought of the mission, but the pieces had rolled relentlessly into place. The asset had managed to rent a suitable space, had given the key to the case officer, who had passed it to the team at a hastily established dead-drop. From there, she’d dressed from head to toe in a black abaya , hidden her face with a niqab , and walked into the building behind Samir, moving straight up to the apartment.

They’d passed another male on the stairs, and staring at the steps as she walked, she was certain the man could hear her heart thumping like a bass drum.

Samir had left her there, waiting on nightfall, and had loaded Pike and the others into a panel van, parking it on the street outside the target. They were her only means of rescue should things go wrong.

She looked out the window at the target building, dimly lit by streetlights, running through her mind the thousands of things that could go wrong and how she would counter them. She felt her cell phone vibrate and saw a text from Pike.

How’s it going?

She’d sent a status report every ten minutes, per their plan, but knew Pike was worried about her. As he should be. Asshole.

She replied, Fine.

PIKE: Hot as hell in van. No AC. Should have planned for that.

JENNIFER: Serves right. Ur not doing any work.

PIKE: Let’s f’ing hope not. If I am, things have gotten bad.

She really didn’t need that reminder, and simply sent back K .

Soon, much, much too soon, it was time to go. She texted that she was going off cell and onto radio comms, then prepped for the mission.

Dressed in a black Under Armour second-skin top and bottom, she cinched her hair into a tight ponytail, affixing the covert earplug into her ear canal and the small transmitter/receiver to a nylon belt around her waist. After getting a communications check with Pike, she did one final scrub of the cloning device and mini-computer she would use to crack the system in the target, getting a green light. She placed it, two flashbang grenades, a lockpick kit, and a thermal imaging device into a backpack. Once she was satisfied at how the equipment was weighted in the backpack, she strapped on a shoulder holster with a suppressed Glock 30, her only means of defense. The last thing she did was place a circular glass cutter inside the neckline of her Under Armour shirt, trapped against her chest by the material.

She shrugged into the backpack, took a deep breath, and said, “Exiting the building.”

She heard a “Roger” as she was maneuvering the backpack through the small window opening. Standing on the thin shelf, she ran her hands up the rough wall, reaching for the shelf on the fourth floor. Once she made contact, she called, “Moving,” and began a slide-shuffle down the ledge toward the wall of the alley.

The trip went smoothly until she made the final corner from the alley wall to the target building. Sliding her hand forward, she hit empty air as the ledge above her disappeared.

She slipped backward and teetered for an eternity, held on to the wall by just two fingers of her left hand that still had contact with the upper ledge.