The Brit was livid! He wanted to kill his entire team. He wanted to kill everyone they reported to, then he wanted to go out and kill everyone he even remotely thought was a terrorist. He had the training to do it and by God it was time he put that training to use!
What had set the Brit off was the cable news. The bombings had finally happened in Lutton. Three subway trains and a bus, all within half an hour of each other. It appeared that the person on the bus had gotten stuck in traffic, so he took out the bus because he missed his train.
This had been what the Brit feared. People would sit on their arses and the attack would be carried out. At least the main objective of the attack had failed. From the pattern displayed on the news, it looked as though the terrorists had planned on blowing up each train as it got to the point where one tunnel joined another tunnel. This would have taken out or at least blocked the floodgates.
Why were the floodgates important? The Brit had it figured out long before the journalists. The last bomb, which went off on the bus, was significantly larger than the others. This terrorist’s train would have been in the tunnel under the river when the bomb detonated. They were planning on flooding the entire subway system, killing everyone on the other trains down there. Hundreds, if not thousands, would have been stranded with no affordable method of getting home.
It was the kind of attack which showed a lot of planning. While the people blowing themselves up might have been illiterate inbred bastards from some poverty-stricken region of the world, the plan had come from someone with training. Nobody on the Brit’s team had seen this coming, not even the Brit. Most were assuming they were going to try and blow up a pair of trains passing each other in opposite directions to maximize casualties. Nobody had thought this far out.
“We should have thought this far out,” the Brit said. They had already tried to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge more than once. Thankfully, the people they sent to do it were so useless they ended up getting busted in a routine traffic stop before they had even assembled all of the explosives for the job.
The Brit was lost in his raging thoughts when the phone rang. It was the man in the suit calling him.
“I assume you’ve seen the news.”
“You bloody well know I have!” screamed the Brit.
“There is a team showing up at your hotel inside fifteen minutes. Meet them downstairs. British authorities want to handle the remnants of the Lutton cell, but we are cleared to round up four other cells. They aren’t being arrested; they are being taken to our interrogation center.”
“Oh! Now we can round them up!” screamed the Brit.
“Nobody saw this one coming, not even you!” said the man in the suit. “If you had put this before me we would have rounded up what we had. It wouldn’t have stopped the attack since we only knew of a few and still hadn’t seen any explosives. I’ll wager that when the news starts giving us the identities of the bombers none of those names will be on our suspect list, either.”
That truth took some of the wind out of the Brit’s sails. He hadn’t seen this coming and they had only three names of cell members. This act took one more person than they had identified and there was probably a support network in place for this team.
“What do we do with the ones we nab?” asked the Brit.
“The driver knows of a building on a runway which was used for bombers during WWII. It’s mostly shut down now, but we have people arriving there to set up a holding pen and wait for the rest of the planes.”
“Planes?”
“If you get everybody on the list you will have over sixty prisoners. That’s really more than we are prepared for at the interrogation center, but we have to nab these before British authorities start wanting to nab more of their own.”
“What are my orders for tomorrow?” “You and the rest of the team will remain with the prisoners until they have all been loaded, so pack some rations and overnight supplies. I don’t yet have another assignment for you, but should shortly.” With that the conversation ended. The Brit went about getting his hardware and putting some MREs along with bottled water into his backpack. One thing was for certain, leading the life he led, the first thing he did when he landed anywhere was to obtain a case of MREs. Militaries around the world stopped calling the food they supplied “rations.” Now the prepackaged food troops were ordered to carry was called an MRE, Meal Ready to Eat. They weren’t really ready. You had to have a little heater kit that got hot when you put water on it to warm them up, but it was better than a can of beans, which was what rations used to be.
Most people hated being forced to eat MREs. Some of them were good, but most made high-school cafeteria food seem like fine dining and airline food a mouth-watering experience. If you wanted to survive in the field, though, you had to have a tolerance for them. Some of them had some nasty preservatives. They didn’t seem to ship that twenty-year bread anymore. Even the surplus catalogs didn’t have it these days. That stuff tasted great, and really would last in its package twenty years on a shelf. But it had so much MSG and other preservatives in it that if you ate the entire “loaf” in one sitting you got a severe case of the “quick step.” Nothing makes a hike pure misery faster than a case of diarrhea. In a jungle or a desert, you would be dead before the end of a two-day march unless you happened to find lots of drinkable water along the way. Gathering water along the way was always a risk.
Among the many sacrifices a professional in this business made was they committed to eating at least one MRE per day even when they weren’t on duty. It wasn’t that you liked them, you simply wanted to live when you were on duty.
The Brit had been given time off while waiting for his next assignment. He had come home to England and taken a room at a hotel he liked. There really wasn’t much “home” left here for him. He had a sister, but he didn’t really communicate with her much. They got along well, and he loved her like a sister, but given what he did for a living, he kept his distance. She was married with two kids and he didn’t want to put any of the family he had left at risk.
Most people would take one look at this hotel and wonder why the Brit liked it. Achieving a two-star rating was simply a dream for it. The Brit didn’t mind so much. It was a blue-collar area. There were some good pubs within walking distance and the owner liked him. The owner actually let him put a great big gun safe in a storage room. Thanks to home-owner marketing, the gun safe simply looked like a great big safe. The only thing that made it a gun safe was the inside of it having notches to stand guns upright on one side, hooks to hang hand guns in the back, and some shelves to put ordinary things on. This one even had a smaller safe in the bottom so you could keep really valuable stuff.
The Brit grabbed his large duffel bag and headed for the gun safe. He met the owner on his way there.
“You’ve seen the news?”
“Aye, mate.”
“They are sending you out to do something about this?” the owner queried, seeing the bag and backpack.
“Not this one so much as stopping the next three,” the Brit responded. “Too many regulars involved in this one for us to wander in.”
With that the owner nodded and unlocked the storage room. Normally you wouldn’t lock a storage room with little of value in it, but the owner knew the gun safe was in there, and given some of his clients, he’d lock up the little bars of soap if he could. The owner didn’t stick around to see what was in the safe. He understood this man’s occupation enough to want to know even less than he did know.
It was always kind of odd when the Brit stayed here. It was like the whole town knew the mercenaries were back. Fights didn’t happen in the bars very often. The really low-end scum didn’t try to rent a room at his place. The drug dealers hid themselves — well, most of them did. The others were just found dead in an alley shortly after doing a deal in the open. The people out on these streets seemed to know the second one of these guys’ planes had touched down. Anyone who lived here long enough would notice the quiet. It was like the quiet when wildlife flees before an earthquake.
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