Target America

9

Though one would not have necessarily guessed it by his present line of work, Daniel Crosswhite was a Medal of Honor recipient and a former Delta Force operator who had survived many deadly incursions behind enemy lines. He had been discharged from the army six months prior due to a fractured hip and pelvis sustained in his last combat jump. He could still run and fight, just not well enough by Special Forces standards, and so the army had asked him to resign his commission.

There were other factors involved, of course, primarily the fact that Crosswhite had led an unauthorized rescue mission in Afghanistan to rescue a female helicopter pilot named Sandra Brux. The mission had been a failure and had very nearly resulted in the deaths of two of the men in his command. Even though Crosswhite had gone on to help successfully rescue Brux a couple of weeks later, winning himself the Medal of Honor in the process, this had only caused his superiors to resent his presence in Delta Force all the more.

Crosswhite now drew a small disability pension from the Veterans Administration, but that barely paid the bills, and he was not the type to sit around waiting on what he considered to be a handout, especially when so many other veterans were receiving no assistance whatsoever. So he had sought out a former Navy SEAL named Brett Tuckerman to help him with a little enterprise he had dreamed up one night while watching the local news in his hometown of New York City.

Tuckerman was a true wild card: a gunfighter and gambling addict who couldn’t pass a poker game if he was chained to a D8 Cat going in the opposite direction. His friends within the Special Ops community all called him Conman, a nickname he had come by honestly. He and Crosswhite had first met during the unauthorized rescue mission into the Waigal Valley, and Tuckerman too had eventually paid the price for his involvement in the ill-fated mission by being kicked out of DEVGRU (also known as SEAL Team VI) a few months later — as had every other SEAL involved in the same op.

After that, Tuckerman had lost all interest in serving in the United States Navy, returning home to Las Vegas to take up the game of poker full-time. He spent the next five months snorting coke and chasing women up and down the Strip. When Crosswhite finally caught up to him, he’d been facedown in his own vomit in a Bellagio hotel room that wasn’t even registered in his name.

Tuckerman and Crosswhite now sat staring out the back window of a beat-up dog grooming van in Detroit, watching the house of a methamphetamine dealer named Terrance Booker. A decked-out yellow Hummer pulled up in front of the house, and two men got out, each with a bulging black backpack slung over his shoulder. He glanced at his watch, shaking his head in dismay. “Exactly zero three-thirty hours. How are these motherfuckers so punctual? They’re fuckin’ criminals.”

“So are we,” Crosswhite said, shrugging into his body armor. “They got our goddamn money with ’em?”

“They do.” Tuckerman wasn’t a large fellow — only five foot six, 145 pounds — but at twenty-nine, he still carried most of his muscle from his days in the SEALs.

Crosswhite was taller, a few years older, handsome with dark hair and a devil-may-care smile. “Remember,” he said, “this motherfucker’s been down twice for child molestation, so if he puts up any fight at all, don’t hesitate to waste his ass.”

They were dressed for combat pretty much the same as when they’d operated with Special Forces, only instead of camouflage, they were dressed all in black with FBI stenciled on their body armor front and back. They carried no identification, and they always wore leather tactical gloves. They’d made a pact with each other on the first day: if either man was ever wounded badly enough that he needed a hospital, the other would put a bullet through his head.

Neither wanted to end up in prison.

The adrenaline rush they experienced in their new line of work was as important to them as the cash, most of which they blew in Vegas anyhow. For them, life outside of Special Ops just moved too slowly, and they scarcely knew how to function among regular people with no concept of the things they had done and seen during their time in combat.

“I find myself unable to adjust,” Crosswhite had said dryly, by way of explanation, on the morning he’d first pitched his idea to Tuckerman.

“Yeah, well look at me,” Tuckerman had replied, gesturing at his vomit-stained shirt, the two of them sitting in a buffet breakfast joint on the northern end of the Vegas Strip. “I’m not exactly the poster child for assimilation.”

They waited until the men in the Hummer came back out and drove off before dismounting the van and moving quickly into the shadows alongside the house. The night vision monoculars attached to their IBH helmets allowed them to see everything with perfect clarity. The two moved stealthily around to the back of the house, where they would use a double length of commercial detonating cord to blow the reinforced steel door off its hinges. Their main armament were suppressed M4s, with suppressed .45 caliber Sig Sauer pistols for backup, all of it equipped with laser sighting. They hadn’t yet acquired fragmentation grenades, but their load-out did consist of six flash-bangs apiece. The body armor was of Special Forces quality and would stop an AK-47 round point-blank. They were not loaded out for speed or agility. They were loaded out for hard-hitting, break-your-fucking-head-open combat, and they were prepared to do whatever it took to get what they came for.

To their way of the thinking, the drug dealers they took down — and had so far twice ended up killing — were no different from any other enemy they’d ever encountered in combat. In many cases, they were probably worse. Take Terrance Booker, for example, a twice-convicted child molester and meth dealer. How many lives had this joker helped destroy during his thirty-five years on the planet? The figure likely stretched into the thousands.

Tuckerman opened the storm door, and Crosswhite duct taped the det cord across the hinges, lighting the fused end of the blasting cap and ducking back around the corner of the house, each man wearing earplugs, goggles, and a black balaclava to cover his face.

Ten seconds later, the det cord exploded with a sharp blast, and Crosswhite jumped out to kick the door into the house, where it fell with a crash against the kitchen floor. A woman started screaming immediately from the living room, and Crosswhite shouted “FBI!” at the top of his voice as they bounded inside.

“FBI!” Tuckerman echoed as they moved into the living room. Two men sat looking stunned on the couch in front of the television. “FBI! Everybody down on the fucking floor — now!”

Crosswhite shoved the woman into a chair and told her to shut the fuck up as the two men threw themselves onto the floor with their hands over the backs of their heads.

Neither one of them was Terrance Booker.

“Where the fuck is Booker?” demanded Crosswhite.

“Upstairs, man,” said one of the men on the floor. “He upstairs.”

Tuckerman kept them covered while Crosswhite moved toward the stairs on the far side of the living room. Four shots rang out, and Crosswhite felt the bullets pelt against the back of his armor. He spun around, cutting loose with the M4 and spraying twenty rounds of 5.56 mm straight down the hallway through the bathroom door just as it was slamming shut. He charged down the hall and kicked the door open to see a bloody Terrance Booker sprawled backward over the edge of the bathtub.

He bounded back into the living room. “All clear back there,” he said. “Booker’s dead. Punish those cocksuckers for lying!”

Tuckerman put a round through each of their knees, and they both howled in agony, crippled for life. The woman began to scream again, one of the men apparently being her boyfriend, and Tuckerman busted her in the face with the stock of the M4, sprawling her out cold on the floor.

“You ain’t no fuckin’ FBI, motha’fucker!” the boyfriend bellowed, gripping his knee with blood gushing through his fingers.

Tuckerman delivered him a kick to the face and signaled for Crosswhite to move up the stairs.

The black backpacks were sitting in plain sight on the bed in the master bedroom. Crosswhite took a moment to check them out, making sure they were full of money, as their informant had told them they would be. He was slinging them over his shoulder and turning for the door when the sound of someone coughing stopped him. The cough had come from the closet and sounded like that of a child. He opened the door, and a young black girl sat on a pillow looking up at him. She could not have been more than nine or ten years old, her big brown eyes wide and hopeful. From the looks of things, she had been living in the closet for some time.

“Can I go home now?” she asked.

Crosswhite knelt down and lifted her up. “You bet you can,” he said, carrying her into the hall. “Coming down!” he shouted.

“Clear!” Tuckerman answered.

Crosswhite made the landing and stood at the bottom of the stairs with the girl in one arm and the backpacks of cash in the other. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he said. “She’s been living in a goddamn closet.”

“Are these people your family?” Tuckerman asked the child, pointing at the men on the floor.

The little girl, too scared to speak, just shook her head no. “Get ’er out of here,” Tuckerman said. “I’m right behind you.” Ninety seconds later, he climbed in on the passenger side of the van. “Hit it.”

Crosswhite shifted into drive and pulled away from the curb. He wasn’t surprised that the neighbors were all still inside their homes. This wasn’t the part of town where people came out to gawk when the feds showed up blowing holes in the walls; that was a good way of getting caught in a crossfire that had nothing to do with you.

“Are we solid back there?” he asked a couple of minutes down the road.

Tuckerman took a moment to pull off his balaclava. “I made it look like a gangland hit.” He looked into the back, where the little girl was sitting on the floor, resting against the backpacks full of money. “I’m sorry it’s not more comfortable back there, sweetheart. Where do you live?”

“Chicago,” she said.

Tuckerman slugged the door panel, wishing he could kill the little girl’s abductors again.

“Take it easy,” Crosswhite said quietly. “Do we have any accounts in Chicago that need servicing?”

“Yeah. There’s a guy on the South Side who can put something together for us.”

Crosswhite turned the corner as a police cruiser passed them going in the opposite direction without any lights flashing. “And still nobody’s called it in,” he said, watching the cop in the side-view mirror. “I think I might actually miss this town. It’s been good to us.”

“Too good,” Tuckerman said, pointing a thumb toward the back. “This here is definitely a sign that it’s time to go.”

“Roger that,” Crosswhite replied. “I was just thinking the same thing. Chi-Town’s a good place to expand our business.”