Changing of the Guard

27

Kent wanted this to go by the numbers, and he was being very careful not to do anything to screw it up. It was, after all, his first field op for Net Force.

At the moment, he was in that RV that Lieutenant Fernandez — who was about to become a Captain as General Howard’s parting gift, though he didn’t know it yet — had scored. It was a comfortable way to sit surveillance, that was for sure.

John Howard sat on the couch, looking through the one-way polarized glass at the subject’s house. The man who lived there was one Eduard Natadze, a Georgian native. They didn’t know much else about him, except for the guitar material, but that didn’t matter — they knew what he looked like, they had his house in sight, and they knew if he showed up, they were going to grab him, which should be enough info to do the job.

Jay Gridley perched on one of the captain’s chairs, also staring out at the surveillance scene. He didn’t need to be here, but Kent understood why he wanted to be. He wouldn’t get in the way.

It was Kent himself who was the problem. He simply wasn’t as comfortable as he’d like to be. He knew he didn’t have any problems at all when it came to a battlefield, but this kind of operation was not his forte. Sure, he had done enough intel gathering over the years to know you sometimes had to sneak instead of stomp, but this was the first time he’d ever mounted an operation on U.S. soil, other than in training or VR exercises, and he wanted a win.

So far, everything had gone like a Swiss watch.

They were parked within two hundred meters of the subject’s residence. Fernandez had an eight-trooper team scattered around the place either disguised or in hiding. There was a “repairman” working on a street light, a “gardener” clipping bushes, and others hidden inside nondescript cars and trucks, ringing the house. When the guy came home, they’d have him.

His car was there, but he wasn’t in the house, they knew that, not unless he could make himself invisible to their FLIR and sound sensors, which could pick up a man’s body heat and the sound of his respiration. Unless he was hiding in a freezer and breathing real slow…

But as the day wore into night, and eventually into day again, there was no sign of the subject. Maybe he was out of town.

As Gridley crawled out of the overhead bed just after dawn, he said, “I just had a thought. Commander Thorn talked to the guy who delivers this guy’s guitars, right?”

Kent said, “That’s what he said.”

“Let me check something.”

Gridley sat on the couch, opened his flatscreen, and began tapping the keys. After a moment, he said, “Well, that’s that.”

“What?”

“I tapped into the carrier’s delivery logs for this address.”

“And…?”

“There are four of them in the last six months. All of them at exactly the same time: 1:30 p.m.”

General Howard came out of the head in the back of the coach, rubbing his face. “And this means what?”

“It seems unlikely that the driver would make four deliveries to the same address at exactly the same moment.”

“Yes,” Kent said, “it does. But I fail to see the significance. Why would the driver put down something that wasn’t so?”

Howard said, “These guitars are valuable, right? So if you were a guy paying for them, you probably wouldn’t want them sitting out on the front porch until you got home. Bad weather, a sticky-fingered passerby, that would be bad.”

Jay nodded. “So maybe the delivery guy has a key? So he can leave them inside?”

“If you had a house full of expensive guitars, would you give a delivery guy a key?”

“I wouldn’t,” Kent said.

“So maybe Natadze has some other arrangement with the guy,” Howard said. “Maybe the guy only comes round when he knows Natadze will be here.”

“Exactly,” Jay said. “I’m thinking our delivery guy probably just scanned the guitars as delivered at some point during the day — probably on his lunch hour, which would explain why the time was exactly the same for each delivery. But he didn’t actually deliver them until later, probably after hours.”

“Could be,” Kent said, “But even so…?”

Howard picked it up. “That would be service worth a nice tip.”

Kent got it. “Ah. You’re saying this guy is in Natadze’s pocket.”

“He told the Commander about the deliveries. Maybe he told Natadze about the Commander,” Jay said.

“Oh,” Kent and Howard said as one.

“Maybe we better have somebody have a little talk with this delivery guy,” Jay said.

It took a couple of hours, but when the FBI agent called them, he confirmed it. The delivery driver had stalled, but in the end, had confessed to telling Natadze about the query from Net Force.

Jay was right. That was that. At least for now.

“So we missed him,” Kent said. “Probably by minutes.”

Howard nodded, feeling the man’s frustration. “It happens.”

“Not to me.”

Howard said. “Have you taken up walking next to the ferry when you cross the river, Abe?”

Kent’s jaw muscles danced. He was probably thinking something he didn’t want to say to a general, even one who was his friend. Howard understood the feeling. He glanced at Julio, who had come by to hear the sitrep. Maybe he could make Abe feel a little better.

Howard said, “Listen, a few years back, we had a shooter on our to-do list, a Russian guy who called himself Ruzhyó.”

He saw Julio smile and shake his head.

“The op was out in the middle of the Nevada desert, nobody else around, the guy living in a trailer. Should have been a walk in the park. We set it up, went to collect him, by-the-book, and this one guy gave us a world of hurt. Had bouncing-betty mines jury-rigged, bigger explosives, a rack full of guns, and he was ready for us. We had troops blasted and down before we knew what hit us. Guy laid smoke and took off in his car, but we had the perimeter and he didn’t have a prayer. A couple hundred yards away, his car blew up. Big explosion, body parts everywhere, and end of mission.

“We packed it up, I left a couple of men in the trailer to secure it, and we went home to lick our wounds.”

“But at least you got him.”

Howard shook his head. “No, we didn’t. He suckered us. He was buried in a hidey-hole. The car ran on a remote, the body parts were a mix of an old lab skeleton and a butcher shop. After we left, he climbed out of his concealment, went to the trailer, killed the two men I’d left, and disappeared.”

Kent turned to look at Howard.

“Yeah. One step ahead of me all the way. He’d been a Spetsnaz guy and a shooter for years, he had figured we’d find him one day, and he set up his scenario well in advance. He knew the terrain, knew how we would come in, and he had an answer for all our questions. We underestimated him—I underestimated him — and he cost me two dead and two wounded.

“You didn’t lose anybody here today. The guy was tipped off before we ever rolled, before we even heard about it. There was nothing you could have done to make it work, Abe. He knew we were coming before we did, and he took off. It’s just the breaks.”

Kent nodded. “Point taken.” After a moment, he said, “Knowing you, General, you wouldn’t have been real happy about your Russian. That the end of the story?”

“No. We ran into him again, in England. He hooked up with another bad guy we had reason to talk to, and our second meeting ended with Mr. Ruzhyó pushing up the daisies.”

“That name means ‘rifle,’ doesn’t it? My Russian is very rusty.”

“Yes. And he had one when we came across him — a little twenty-two built into a cane. If we hadn’t been wearing body armor, he would have taken three of us out with that sucker — five shots, five hits. He got one round through a glove, and knocked out another shooter’s weapon. He could have escaped, but for whatever reason, he didn’t, he stood and fought. Hell of a gunslinger. I wished he’d been one of ours.” He paused, then looked at Kent.

“Bad pennies keep turning up. You did everything right, but this guy got a pass. Not your fault. You’ll do better next time.”

“Damn straight I will,” Kent said.

Both Howard and Julio smiled. They knew exactly how he felt.