Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Her jaw dropped as two men in dark clothing emerged from a winding metal staircase beneath it. One turned toward her, his gaze roaming up and down. She pulled the sheet up to her neck as her host shrugged into his coat.

An instant later he plunged down the stairs with the others, the panel lowering back into place, once again becoming part of the hardwood floor before her astonished eyes.

And then she was alone.

It was as if he’d vanished. Or was never there at all.

Leaving her alone, confused, and frightened in his cooling bed.

Dixon roared onto the estate grounds in Rover One. The second BearCat swung in through the blown, crookedly leaning entry gate behind him, peeling off hard to the right and heading off-road as it looped around toward the back of the manor.

He saw Kali glance intently at her tablet, checking that the manor’s security cams were still on delay.

“We good?”

She nodded, and he fed the Cat some gas.

The drive ahead of him was dark. So were the trees and shrubs along its borders. Everything in shadows. The outside floods were dimmed or doused, probably to go easy on the backup generators. Dixon would rely on the roof cameras feeding heat imagery to his dash screen and head-up display.

“Pickles, wide pan.”

“Got it, Dixie.”

He shook his head . Dixie. Maybe Pickles thought it was his bestie . Fernandez was a prize assclown designing an AI that assigned its own nicknames to people. Or had Pickles’s annoying personality developed without his input?

The Cat’s engine growled as he steered around a curve toward the guardhouse. It was still about two hundred feet from the low brick structure when his roof cams caught two guys with rifles dashing from inside. Splitting up the instant they hit the drive, they ducked behind the shrubs to its left and right, their heat signatures making them look like radiant ghosts.

Dixon glanced in his mirror. In the rear section, six of the men were in their bucket seats, three on each side, their weapons poking out the gun ports. The seventh, Emerick, was on the shooter’s platform behind a roof-mounted M110 AI sniper rifle, his head and upper body up through the hatch.

He could see the two operators in the bushes, the Cat’s roof cameras streaming their thermals to his HUD. Though the mesh of twigs and branches cut the images into slivers, it would have taken a solid object like a boulder or tree trunk to block them entirely—and he figured they knew it. But there was no better cover available.

Emerick swiveled his gun toward the radiant ghost on the right, adjusting its angle to compensate for the Cat’s rapid, jarring movement. The rifle coughed in his hands, the shrub twitched and shuddered, and the ghost fell backward to the ground.

He swung his weapon toward the second one. But before he could lock in, the guy rolled from behind the bush, sprang partly upright, and triggered his gun. Bullets clacked against the front of the hatch.

Emerick returned fire. Ghost Number Two was wearing a plate carrier, but his rifle’s black tip aeroshells could pierce Type III armor like hot needles through butter. The guy went down, spraying ghost blood, the droplets glowing white sparks in Emerick’s night-vision goggles.

Then someone new emerged from the guardhouse. Emerick instantly identified the weapon against his shoulder by its boxy shape. It was an H&K Punisher, the proverbial shiny object—equipped with a laser range finder and programmable rocket-powered grenades, it had been field tested by his Delta unit in Afghanistan. Did well in a controlled environment, but get it out in the sand and dust and heat or match it against composite armor, and it became a forty-pound hunk of steel.

Unless whoever was firing it knew not to target armor. Then it could be deadly.

The third ghost was aiming high.

Emerick reacted quickly, but he was jolting along in the hatch, and Ghost Number Three was on firm ground. It made him a little quicker. There were two pops from his weapon, then a loud whistling whoosh as the spin of its electronic projectiles ranged their target. Emerick tried to drop down into the hatch but never had a chance as the grenades blew a foot above him, scattering stainless-steel fléchettes in all directions.

He heard himself scream. His face and scalp ablaze with agony, he folded down through the hatch and spilled from the platform to the BearCat’s floor.

At that same instant, one of the men at the right-hand gun ports finally got a bead on the ghost with the rocket launcher. His name was Max Spencer, and Emerick was his best buddy.

He fired, saw the guy go down, and shuffled to Emerick’s side, groping for a Sacred Heart medal he wore on a chain around his neck. Jimmy Singh, the medical corpsman, was already working on him, pulling one thing after another out of his blowout kit. Singh exchanged glances with Spencer and shook his head. Emerick wasn’t going to make it. They could see part of his brain through his skull.

Spencer tried to remember a prayer. But his mind was blank, and he just clenched his medal, cursing himself for being too late.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry...”

Dixon pulled a breath through his teeth. He couldn’t slow down. More lives were at stake, and Carmody was depending on him. He couldn’t slow down.

His foot hard on the gas, he suddenly heard a click from his left, and glanced at Kali to see her shrugging free of her harness.

“I’m going back there,” she said.

He looked surprised.

“Singh’s got it,” he said. “I don’t see how you can help.”

She pushed off her seat.

“I have to try,” she said.

6

Satu Mare District, Romania/

The Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine

Carmody’s entry team ran down the wide stone stairs from the north bastion, stacking up in a T formation. He took the point, his flankers abreast of him—Doug Wheeler at ten o’clock, and Joe Begai, a Quickdraw sapper, at two o’clock. Schultz and another of Howard’s E4s, Stafford Sparrow, were bringing up the rear at five and seven.

The wind and snow blew around them. Their rubber soles slapped down on the worn stone steps hugging the wall. The manor’s exterior lights were out, but they had their quad DNVGs flipped down and could see perfectly in the darkness.

The wall to Carmody’s right led through a series of curves to an arched wooden door. Fifteen feet high, thick vertical oak planks, wide iron bands bolted across the top, middle, and bottom. The rust-scabbed, discolored hardware looked ancient and hand-forged and depicted a dragon with a wolf’s head, gaping jaws, and three serpentine tongues looped around the hanging door ring. Its outspread wings formed the lock plate.

He grabbed the handle, pushed, felt no give in the door. Begai got a signal from him and moved up to it. Producing a thermic lance from his vest, he palmed a cartridge into its grip and depressed its firing button. An iron vapor jet hissed out, burning at over five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The dragon glowed red, then white, then started to melt off, its wings curling into themselves, its triple tongues dripping down over the circular handle.

A second later, the handle clanged onto the steps.

Carmody motioned for Begai to stand clear and stomp-kicked the door, driving in his heel under the smoking, dripping lock plate.

The door swung open heavily. It was reinforced on the inside, a modern addition, the solid steel liner attached to the wood with smooth, flush riveting. The steel popped and bubbled where the lance’s vapor jet must have penetrated.

Carmody stormed through into a lightless, narrow passage, the men falling into single file behind him. It was a tight squeeze and came to a dead end on the right. But looking to his left, past an interior arch, he saw a descending staircase blocked by a mesh gate.