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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should have thought this far out,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The Brit was lost in his raging thoughts when the phone rang. It was the man in the suit calling him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI assume you\u2019ve seen the news.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou bloody well know I have!\u201d screamed the Brit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere 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\u2019t being arrested; they are being taken to our interrogation center.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh! Now<\/i> we can round them up!\u201d screamed the Brit.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody saw this one coming, not even you!\u201d said the man in the suit. \u201cIf you had put this before me we would have rounded up what we had. It wouldn\u2019t have stopped the attack since we only knew of a few and still hadn\u2019t seen any explosives. I\u2019ll wager that when the news starts giving us the identities of the bombers none of those names will be on our suspect list, either.\u201d<\/p>\n
That truth took some of the wind out of the Brit\u2019s sails. He hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do we do with the ones we nab?\u201d asked the Brit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe driver knows of a building on a runway which was used for bombers during WWII. It\u2019s mostly shut down now, but we have people arriving there to set up a holding pen and wait for the rest of the planes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPlanes?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you get everybody on the list you will have over sixty prisoners. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are my orders for tomorrow?\u201d \u201cYou 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\u2019t yet have another assignment for you, but should shortly.\u201d 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 \u201crations.\u201d Now the prepackaged food troops were ordered to carry was called an MRE, Meal Ready to Eat. They weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t seem to ship that twenty-year bread anymore. Even the surplus catalogs didn\u2019t 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 \u201cloaf\u201d in one sitting you got a severe case of the \u201cquick step.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t on duty. It wasn\u2019t that you liked them, you simply wanted to live when you were on duty.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t much \u201chome\u201d left here for him. He had a sister, but he didn\u2019t 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\u2019t want to put any of the family he had left at risk.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
The Brit grabbed his large duffel bag and headed for the gun safe. He met the owner on his way there.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve seen the news?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAye, mate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are sending you out to do something about this?\u201d the owner queried, seeing the bag and backpack.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot this one so much as stopping the next three,\u201d the Brit responded. \u201cToo many regulars involved in this one for us to wander in.\u201d<\/p>\n
With that the owner nodded and unlocked the storage room. Normally you wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019d lock up the little bars of soap if he could. The owner didn\u2019t stick around to see what was in the safe. He understood this man\u2019s occupation enough to want to know even less than he did know.<\/p>\n
It was always kind of odd when the Brit stayed here. It was like the whole town knew the mercenaries were back. Fights didn\u2019t happen in the bars very often. The really low-end scum didn\u2019t try to rent a room at his place. The drug dealers hid themselves \u2014 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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You are reading a special promotional version of \u201cInfinite Exposure\u201d containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:<\/p>\n