CHAPTER 13
Constantine stood at the back of the room, arms folded, listening to the briefing, for all the good it did him. It was being given in a language he did not speak. He could look at their maps and imagery and make inferences, but he would have to wait for someone to translate the details. The assembled team were mostly police officers, a number of whom seemed to be SWAT, or something like SWAT. SWAT teams were the ultimate wannabe operators, but it was sometimes interesting to see how they worked and trained. And some of them could shoot, at least back home, which was more than anyone could say for the average police officer. This was another country, though, and there was no telling what level of proficiency they actually maintained here.
When the briefing ended, Raines separated from the crowd and made her way over to him. She was pretty, if mostly by virtue of how she presented herself. She was fit, well-dressed in a professional suit and conservative makeup, and she carried herself confidently. Even if hers was not the face of a college cheerleader, there was still plenty to like. Raines had been cool toward him from the outset, though. Apparently, bagging a special forces Chief Warrant was not on her bucket list.
“So apparently the site is in a part of the city that’s generally a no-go for law-enforcement,” she said.
“Is that why they’re bringing all the hardware?” he asked.
“That’s why they’re bringing so much,” she answered. “I think they’re expecting resistance, especially if there is a foreign intel unit bedded down there. I don’t blame them, though. Best case scenario, organized crime gangs. A terror cell is also a possibility. This area is a hot-bed for all kinds of fucked-up stuff.”
“Great. Will I be armed?”
“Yes. We’re officially liaising, so we’ll all be equipped.”
“At least there’s that. So you said it was an anonymous tip that turned you onto this site?”
“A tip led Josh to chatter that might be linked to the Ritter case. We flagged similar traffic and traced it here. The hope is that if we do take down a foreign cell here, we’ll learn something about the team that was hunting our mystery armored figure.”
“And we don’t know anything about the tipster?”
“No. Anonymous,” she said.
He stared at her, and she stared back. They both had the same suspicion, he knew: The tipster could be associated with the resistance element, the very unknown group to which their “mysterious armored figure” belonged.
“Not sure how I feel about that,” he said at length.
“I know. But it’s better than nothing. Better a hidden ally than a hidden enemy, right?”
“You sure these people are our allies?”
“No. Hell no. But I’m prepared to consider it. We’ll know more after this raid.”
“Hope so.”
Raines’s local counterpart approached. “We go to prepare,” he said, looking to her and to Constantine. “I take you to get equipment.”
They nodded and followed. Constantine was disappointed to be issued a submachinegun again. His life had been too much filled with pistol-caliber weapons of late, and he longed for the power of a proper rifle. They were also issued armored vests marking them as municipal police, which was just as well. Neither of them wanted to draw attention. After that, they had time to kill. Raines was pacing.
“If you want my advice, get some sleep,” said Constantine, finding a place on the floor to stretch out.
She pursed her lips and then continued pacing. He shrugged and closed his eyes.
A couple of hours after midnight, they performed final equipment and radio checks. He found Raines fiddling with the night-vision goggles she had been given.
“You ever worked with NODs before?” he asked.
“Just once, and it was a while ago.”
“May I?”
She handed them over, and he ran her through the basics. Power here, gain adjustment here, battery cap there. Interpupillary distance adjustment, fore-and-aft adjustment, height adjustment, and tilt. Objective and ocular lens focus, and the right technique to focus for minimum eye-strain. By the time they had finished that, the rest of the raid team were boarding a convoy of armored vehicles staged in an underground garage. The interpreter found them and directed them to the front-most seats in the rear compartment of the last vehicle. They would be the very last to disembark on site. Constantine smirked, but he said nothing. It was the locals’ show. Once settled in his place (and of course with his muzzle toward the roof and his trigger guarded), he inserted his first magazine into the submachinegun they had given him, racked it, and felt for the safety, ensuring both that it was on and that his thumb was ready to flick it off.
He realized the other occupants of the vehicle were staring at him.
“We do not load weapons until we exit the vehicle,” explained their interpreter.
“Yeah? I don’t leave the wire without a round in the chamber. What if you get hit, or hit an IED? You’re fucked.”
Raines looked from him to them, then to the interpreter, and then loaded her own weapon and chambered a round. Several of the local police officers frowned. Constantine grinned.
It was a long and somewhat winding drive that took them into the ghetto. This city’s ancient streets had been first laid with an eye to horses and the occasional wagon as their heaviest traffic, and even at that they had been haphazardly planned. The several heavy trucks ground over asphalt, brick, and cobblestone, making numerous turns, picking their way by headlights only, refraining from the use of their floodlights, their red-and-blues, and their sirens. Raines had moved quickly on her lead, and all intel—including high-altitude drone surveillance of the subject building—indicated normal activity, with no sign that the suspects were aware of the impending raid.
Just as Constantine was thinking that they had to be getting close, the vehicle’s team leader shouted something that sounded a lot, even to his untrained ear, like a number of minutes.
“Two minutes,” said the interpreter.
The policemen loaded magazines, but still they did not rack their bolts. Constantine managed not to shake his head in disgust. They lowered their night-vision goggles. He looked over at Raines to ensure hers were down and locked in place, and then he lowered his as well, making a final tweak to their tilt. That done, he felt once more for the safety switch on his weapon—again, to reassure himself that it was in the “safe” position but also to orient his hand and keep his thumb on a hair trigger to flick it to the “semi” position. The target building was a public housing tenement, and it was certain to be brim-full of civilian noncombatants, so he planned not to make use of automatic fire. Constantine was quite certain that he could put more rounds on target in a shorter time in semi-auto mode than these jokers could manage in full-auto, anyhow.
Presently, there came another shout, and a translation of, “Thirty seconds.” They felt their vehicle make a final turn and then accelerate. Ten seconds later, the driver braked hard and made one more tight turn, and they all rocked in place as the big truck lurched to a stop. The back doors opened, and the policemen began pouring forth. Raines was on their heels. Constantine took his time; this was a raid by police forces into a building full of their own citizens, however hostile those citizens might be toward their government and other local ethnicities. It was certainly not a combat DA breach-and-clear—much as the SWAT guys might have argued otherwise, had he known enough of their language to give them a hard time about it. Constantine was content to hang back, his weapon at rest in his hands, and watch how they went about their work.
The squad to which he had been attached had been given a rear entrance to the building, and they stacked up along the wall beside the fire door. Two men then moved to the door and applied a piece of machinery to it at the latch. It seemed to be some kind of hydraulic prying tool, which Constantine found interesting. It certainly made short work of the hollow metal door, bending it away from the frame and then, as they laid into the lever, popping it open. They jumped back, one taking the door while the other carried the machine aside, and the “assaulters” filed in, looking very tactical.
Raines caught sight of Constantine and delayed, waiting for him. They entered last, leaving behind the non-SWAT officers who would barricade and control that entry-point.
“This is probably old-hat for you,” she said quietly, as they made their way down the corridor.
“I’ve been on a couple of assaults in-country. We don’t get to do it quite as much as you might think. It’s always interesting to see how other people do things.”
“How are they doing?”
“Fine. Still gonna keep my eyes open, though.”
They were moving down a long corridor, painted for them in shades of green within their goggles and in stark brights and shadows to their peripheral vision. Power to the building had been cut, but the team were using overt white lights and green lasers on their weapons, rather than the covert infrared illuminators and lasers to which Constantine was more accustomed. The type of light made no difference to the goggles, other than that they could be kept at a lower gain because the broad-band white lights put out more energy than a narrow-band infrared emitter. Indeed, a faint hexagonal pattern overlaid on his view queued him to de-gain his tubes a bit more.
“If you see a kind of honey-comb in your NODs, turn your gain down until it goes away,” he said to Raines. Constantine had spent a great many hours “on NODs” during his several tours of duty, under a great many different lighting conditions, so working this way was for him second-nature. He was able to walk naturally and look about all but naturally. (The one difference with night-vision goggles and their narrow field of view was that one could not look by turning only one’s eyes, but was forced to turn one’s face, directing the image-intensifiers at each little thing. Scanning about was a process of constant head movement, a bit like an owl on a perch over a hunting ground.) As he passed by tenement unit doorways, he could see the officers clearing each in pairs, and he could see in a couple of cases the surprised and frightened folk, awakened to the calls of, “Police!” in several languages and placing their hands in the air or on their heads as soon as the bright lights descended on them. No terrorists, these, but simply very poor people who had never assimilated with their host nation. They lived in a ghetto of their own culture, and so they lived in the same poverty they or their parents had known in their nation of origin. The only benefits they had reaped by their migration here were those of the public treasury—all the luxuries of a run-down public housing project and a slim welfare payment—while they continued to stoop under all the oppression and fear inherent in their native way of life. Constantine eyed each of them with suspicion.
No terrorists so far, but he knew how terrorist sentiment could fester in a place such as this.
Their interpreter approached them and flipped up his goggles. Raines put hers up as well, but Constantine did not bother, for his did not bother him.
“We are going up the stairs,” said the interpreter. “The teams are clearing floors. We have not yet found the suspects.”
Constantine and Raines were both on the team’s radio channel, but because all of the chatter was in a foreign tongue, it did them little good, and Constantine had turned his down to a faint background babble. Better to hear his environment than that noise. Raines nodded to the interpreter and followed him as he led them toward a staircase. Constantine just followed, keeping both hands on his primary weapon and letting his long-practiced habit of constant head movement continue to feed him awareness of his surroundings. He felt no particular tension, merely that underlying spirit of distrust. As they mounted the stairs, he looked down at his radio and switched it to a backup channel.
“Hey,” Constantine said quietly, tapping Raines on the arm. Their guide did not notice, so loud was the comm traffic in his own ear. She saw Constantine point to his radio and then hold up three fingers, and she switched hers to match.
“Comm check,” he said, turning his headset up again just loud enough for conversation.
“Loud and clear,” she said. He nodded. This line was quiet, otherwise.
Another corridor, with more endless, identical housing units down both sides. There was also the occasional squatter in the corridor itself, sometimes wrapped in a blanket, sometimes just lying on the floor. They were awake. The team was movingly quietly, but not so quietly that folks one floor ahead had not heard them coming. Constantine saw one of the squatters filming with a cell phone until a policeman grabbed it from his hand.
Pop-pop-pop came the sound of gunfire from elsewhere in the building, followed by the poppoppoppoppop of an automatic weapon. Constantine recognized it immediately. Guns—especially pistols—could sound so innocuous with a bit of distance and a few floors of a structure in the way. Around him, policemen were attending to their earpieces. No doubt their primary channel was blowing up with reports of contact. Now the chaos would begin, thought Constantine. A firefight always brought chaos, and that chaos, that sense of the world slipping out of control, always made his stomach churn. He would never be accustomed to it.
The interpreter was beckoning to them and breaking into a run, along with several other SWAT officers. Raines followed them, and Constantine followed her, though he did not like it. Contact was expected; if it hadn’t been expected, then why had they brought SWAT? And if contact was expected, then there was no sense in one squad rushing or abandoning its job because another squad was in contact. If they couldn’t handle it, then they should hold or fall back until the pincer closed naturally.
“Turn off your light,” he transmitted, killing his own weapon-light so that only the little dot of his laser remained. Raines did not look back, but she did glance down at her weapon, and a moment later he saw the bright, bouncing beam from her weapon-light disappear as well. Her laser also vanished, and it took a few seconds for her to figure out how to get that back on without the torch beam, but she managed. Now she was just a dark silhouette against the lights of the officers rushing ahead of her. That was better than nothing, at least.
The policemen did pause at the major fatal funnels, the stairs and corridor intersections, and there at least give lip service to tactical movement. Up they went several floors in a box stairwell, stopped by another fire door, and then opened it and filed through.
A burst of gunfire from the hallway beyond sent two of them scrambling back. Raines had her gun up, aiming at the door. Constantine opted for a low ready. The two officers who had retreated were in cover behind the doorframe, one standing and one on his knee, spraying fire into the corridor beyond the door as the door swung slowly shut. The reports of their weapons, unsuppressed and firing rapidly in the tight confines of the stairwell, piled up into an echoing din that one could almost feel like pressure on the skin. Constantine was thankful for the protection of his headset, but even with that his ears were ringing. More bullets came their way, holes appeared in the door, and sparks flew, bright green-white by google view. The two policemen continued firing and then advanced through the door again, into the corridor beyond. Raines glanced at Constantine. Constantine eased forward, shouldering and leveling his weapon with his right hand, while with his left hand he caught the door, pushing it open as he made his way by increments around the corner. The two policemen had reached a fallen comrade, one standing and covering the far end of the corridor while the other knelt and tended to the wounded. That would not do, he thought. Tourniquet in place, if needed, but then move to proper cover.
Constantine could see no immediate threat at the far end of the hallway, so he approached the three officers and then tested the door nearest them on the right. It was locked. He kicked it open and moved in.
“On your six,” he heard Raines say behind him. Better than nothing, he decided as he quickly cleared the first room and then the kitchen and dining room beyond. His light he activated in brief flashes, down a narrow hallway on the left and around the corners and into the shadows under the dining table and behind the kitchen counter. He found a small latrine, and another brief blink of his light showed it to be unoccupied as well. Constantine turned his attention to the hall, grabbing Raines by the shoulder and motioning for her to take point. She did not hesitate, and to her credit she had picked up his technique of working her light in brief pulses. Three doors awaited them—one began to open, and she flashed her light at it and saw eyes staring at her.
“Police!” she announced, and then repeated it in as many languages as she had memorized since coming here. She rushed toward the occupied room and caught the door before could fully latch again, entering while Constantine covered the other two. He knew by the height of the eyes which had looked out at them that they had belonged to a child. Where were the parents, and how would the parents react to armed intruders—even police—in their children’s quarters?
“Clear,” she said behind him. He glanced and saw her motioning for a young girl to stay on the bed to which she had retreated. Constantine kept his attention on the opposite door and directed Raines to the third, at the end of the hall. She opened it and found a full bathroom (albeit still tiny and cramped). Constantine tested the knob of the final door, opened it, and flashed his light within. There was a bed, and one person asleep in it, which astonished him.
He stepped into the room, swept it for other occupants, found none, and advanced on the sleeper.
Drug paraphernalia answered his question. He left the woman to lie and returned to the hallway. “One druggy, out cold,” he said, brushing past Raines and hustling back to the apartment’s entrance. Outside the apartment, in the main corridor, the police were still tending to their fallen. He smacked the cover man on the arm and gestured, pantomiming as if he were throwing the both of them into the apartment. The policeman took his meaning, spoke to the one applying first aid, and they dragged the third into the apartment’s sitting room. Constantine noted that the wounded man was their interpreter.
“Fuckin’ fantastic,” he muttered as Raines joined him and made the same observation. She snorted.
“Well, now what?” she said.
“You tell me. This is your show.”
She thought for a moment. They could hear gunfire not too far away, but it was sporadic and never heavy.
“I know you’re going to say we should wait here for reinforcements,” said Raines, “but I want to push ahead. Wherever the shooting is happening, that’s our mission. If they get away, or fuckin’ burn something before we can get to it—or, God forbid, the locals end up losing evidence because they don’t know what they’re looking for…”
“I hear you,” said Constantine. “We can’t effectively clear with just the two of us, though. Going further in will be dangerous. Best we can do is try to move quickly and link up with another squad— assuming they don’t shoot us in the confusion.”
Raines grimaced. She leaned ever so carefully into the main corridor to peer toward the deeper reaches of the building, and then she straightened and looked around. Finally, she looked down at the two policemen still attending to their fallen comrade and largely ignoring their foreign hangers-on. She grabbed hold of the one who was not intimately involved in medical aid, by the shoulder-strap of his vest, and pulled him up.
“You’re coming with us,” she said to him. “Come on.”
Constantine grinned. He was beginning to like Special Agent Raines.
The policeman she had nominated issued some manner of protests which neither of them understood and which both of them largely ignored. Constantine pointed at the one giving aid and at his patient and made a motion for them to stay where they were, and then he “sliced the pie” into the corridor.
“Move up to the intersection. Stay left.”
Raines did so, crossing to the other side and progressing to the end of the corridor, where it joined another at a T-junction. Constantine now took hold of their “volunteer” and motioned for him to go. The policeman looked back at his partner, who said something that sounded like resignation. He nodded, issued a comment to Constantine that Constantine suspected was not meant to be polite, and moved to join Raines down the hall. Constantine followed. At the junction, they had a choice of left or right. Given the geometry of the building as they had observed it, Constantine suspected a left turn was called for, and a burst of gunfire confirmed his guess a moment later.
He caught the gaze of the policeman, gestured to his eyes, and pointed to the right. Once the policeman was covering that direction, he said to Raines, “I’ll move up. You cover me until I stop, then follow. We’ll go intersection to intersection, with this ass-hole covering our rear. Keep half an eye on where we came from; we’re still short-handed for this kind of movement.”
“I get you.”
Constantine stepped across to the other side of the hallway and then made his way along the right-hand wall, refraining from the use of his light as much as he could. Here the apartment doors were only on the right, and he slowed as he approached each, easing out from the wall just enough to assess whether each door was fully closed. They were, to the last. On the other side of the corridor the wall gave way to windows overlooking some sort of outdoor space. He could see in his world of greens the flashing of police lights reflecting off the far wings of the building.
After a while, there were no more apartments. He came to a double doorway, propped open, and through that a passage with windows on both sides. Some kind of bridge or skyway, it seemed. Constantine halted there by the entrance to it and motioned for Raines to move up, which she did. Their adopted third man was looking back and forth, from them to the area he was supposed to be covering, as if afraid he might be left behind. Constantine gave him a wave, and Raines covered his approach as he regrouped with them.
Constantine gestured to him as before: Eyes, that way. He pointed toward the next junction, the other wing of this building.
The policeman nodded and fixed his gaze in that direction, holding his weapon at the ready.
Constantine sighed. He patted the man on his vest to get his attention, pointed at the policeman’s chest, and then pointed at a position just past the double door, emphasizing it by shining his weapon’s laser there as well. The man took Constantine’s hints and moved to the suggested position, while Constantine peeked through the doors to the bridge, and Raines continued to cover their proverbial six. Once the policeman was in position, Constantine whispered to Raines, “Straight ahead? Or take this bridge?”
Raines eased back and looked through the door. She frowned. “No idea,” she replied in kind. “Have you heard any more gunfire?”
“Not for a minute. And I have no idea where the guys went that we took contact from.”
She nodded, returning her watch to the direction from which they had come. “There’s supposed to be another team handling the other wing of this structure. All the exits are covered. So either across the bridge, or higher floor.”
Constantine frowned, thought for a moment, and then eased over to the windows overlooking the large courtyard. Outside, the night was still quite dark aside from the police lights. The power to the building was still out, and there was no emergency lighting—at least, none functional. Looking at the two wings extending away from him on either side of the yard, he could see here and there windows lit from within by searching flashlights. The police continued to move with overt lights, and even the tiny glint of a beam around the edge of a curtain shone brightly through the light-amplifying tubes of his goggles. He spent a minute scanning the windows of the complex’s upper floors.
“I don’t see any activity further up,” he said. He looked at the policeman. “Hey. Police. Which way?” He gestured down the hall, and then toward the bridge.
The policeman gave him a shrug and a facial expression that clearly communicated, “How should I know?”
Constantine tapped his headset and radio. “Call ‘em.”
The policeman blinked, and then he keyed his radio and held a quick conversation with someone. When that was over, he gestured toward the bridge. Constantine looked at Raines.
“Good enough for me,” she said.
Constantine nodded. He took the left side and gestured for Raines to take the right. The policeman he directed to follow him close along the left side, but with eyes to the rear for any trouble that might follow. This was one of the challenges of a complex interior space: each increment of it had to be treated with the same care, the same attention to detail and procedure, no matter how many doors the team went through, how many rooms they had to clear, how many hallways and junctions. The moment you relaxed…
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
As he moved along the bridge, he looked out the windows here as well, assessing upper floors of the wing ahead and the wing they were leaving behind. “Possible movement,” he observed, noting a flicker through drawn curtains. “One floor up behind us.”
“I’ve got moving lights,” said Raines. Once again, she had seen what he was doing and had picked up the cue. “Top floor ahead on this side.”
“Movement front,” Constantine added, as a glow appeared at the far end of the bridge. There the bridge ended in another T-intersection, and a light source was approaching from the left, illuminating in pale green the walls of the corridor and bleeding into the skyway. The spark of handheld light appeared, creating a bloom and halo on his goggles which obscured the details of the person holding it. It was not that the image became suddenly blindingly bright (a common misconception about night-vision devices), but that a bright light source shone directly into the goggles produced a bright green-white six-pointed starburst and surrounding halo that simply painted over everything around them. Even if the light source was in the background, the halo it created was inside the light-amplifying tube itself and therefore always in the foreground, covering up everything else. Newer models had smaller halos, and some would automatically de-gain to reduce the size of the starburst—but degaining the tube would only make the surrounding details darker and harder to discern. No, there was only one solution to the problem of light when using NODs: Constantine flicked on his own, shining it at the person at the other end.
“Two MAMs—gun,” he added, moving his safety switch with his well-prepared thumb and clicking his trigger several times. One of the figures had raised a pistol his way, but his light and laser dot were already on the person’s chest, so he had only to firm up his position and hold it still through the very mild, rolling recoil of his weapon’s operating cycle. Constantine did not hear his gun fire, even though it was unsuppressed. Auditory exclusion; he was accustomed to the phenomenon. He saw his muzzle flash in his goggles, like a strobe further illuminating the bridge and his targets. He saw every bullet impact. He saw the other figure, the other boy, take off running to the right, dropping a makeshift club he had been carrying. The one with the gun struck the ground. Constantine moved forward at a hustle.
“Mams?” Raines was asking. He reached the body and pulled the pistol away from the boy’s hand with his toe, giving it a kick to slide it back toward the policeman behind him. He motioned to Raines to direct her eyes to the left, while he looked right, down the new corridor. No one else could they see.
“Military-aged males,” he said at last.
“Ah.”
“Everyone’s got their own acronyms. They change every few years, too. God knows why. I think someone gets a FITREP bullet out of it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Nevermind. Should be a stairwell to the right, right?”
“I think so.”
He looked back. “You still with us, police?”
The policeman was staring down at the young man lying dead on the floor. Constantine realized there was probably some police protocol to an encounter like that—shouting “Police! Drop the gun!” or something of that sort—which had not even crossed his mind. This was why military and police were separate entities in a developed nation. It did not overly worry him, though. The kid had pointed a gun. If the local constabulary wanted to have a fit over it and kick him out of their country, it would hardly be his loss.
“Police,” Constantine hissed again, drawing the man’s attention. He pointed to the spot where Raines was standing, then gestured to his eyes and to the corridor leftward. The policeman tore his eyes from the body and moved up, and then Constantine motioned for the team to proceed, making the right turn into the corridor, he along the left wall, they along the right. They stalked along and, after passing a few more apartments and what looked like a laundry, did find a door to another stairwell. Constantine stopped, knelt, and listened, while Raines covered forward and the policeman aft. His ear brought him only silence from the other side. As carefully as he could muster, he turned the handle and pulled the door open.
It was dark within. He could see no sign of lights below or above, nor hear any movement. Constantine stepped in and held the door for the other two. Once again, he assigned the policeman to cover their rear flank, while he and Raines advanced up the stairs by sections, carefully, he demonstrating the best way to approach each flight and look ahead while exposing as little of his body as possible. It was the best way he knew, but that did not make it a good way. He knew of no good way to climb a staircase that had or might have bad guys on it. Fortunately for his nerves, they had only two stories more to ascend to their destination. Unfortunately for his nerves, getting there left him with the problem of another door.
All three paused. They remembered vividly the last time they had tried to exit a stairwell in this building. Once again, Constantine took a moment just to listen to the door. He glanced at the others and then had them douse all visible lights, even their lasers. Unlike in the movies (where moments like this were always dramatically smoke- or fog-filled), to the naked eye their lasers were only visible as two points of light, a faint one on the weapon and a bright one that danced about on the floor, the wall, the target, as the weapon pointed. Through the goggles, the beams themselves were only barely discernible, glinting off minute, otherwise invisible dust-motes in the air. Once the lasers were off, the stairwell was perfectly dark as far as Constantine could tell. Even in his goggles all he could see was black, and as he turned up their gain only more black, plus a faint greenish sparkling, no brighter than ice dust glittering in star light. This was what they called scintillation, the random shedding of electrons from the goggles’ microchannel plates at full power. Ever so carefully, Constantine worked the release bar on the door, squeezing it down with his hand until it was fully depressed, and then he began to open the door itself.
A growing vertical line of the faintest green in the image presented by his goggles, barely more visible than their scintillation, was all he could see of the widening crack. That was good. The corridor outside was almost as dark as the pitch-black stairwell. He continued to press the door open, pausing only when its rusty hinges began to squeak. When he heard no reaction to that sound, he continued until he had enough of an opening through which he could, slowly, fit his helmet and NODs.
This corridor was indeed dark, enough that the doors lining it at its near end were little more than sparkling hints of rectangular shape. At the far end, though, the corridor made a ninety-degree bend, and the end facing him was a pale rectangle of brighter light. There was a light source somewhere around that bend. Constantine tilted his head slightly, so that he could look past his goggles with his naked eye. He saw absolutely nothing. The darkness was so complete it may as well have been physical. Through his goggles again, there was the corridor before him, and the comparatively well-lit turn at the far end. The source of illumination around the corner, then, was nothing that a human eye could use. He finished opening the door and eased forward.
“Clear,” he said, in his lowest sotto voce. “Careful. Move slow.”
He could hear them, feeling their way through the doorway. He could see them go by, but only as near-subliminal waves in the scintillation that filled his vision. The policeman whispered something.
Constantine realized he was whispering into his radio, a status report of some sort.
“Move left,” he told them, finding each of them with his hands and maneuvering them toward the left-hand wall. Once he had himself oriented on both of them, and had them oriented toward the far end of the hall, he found the policeman’s left hand and put it on Raines’s right shoulder. He then positioned the muzzle of the policeman’s gun there as well, over her shoulder and safely past her headset, so that it would not be pointed at her back or the back of her legs. That done, he ducked down and moved in front of Raines, taking her left hand and putting it on his shoulder. “Put your gun up over my shoulder, by my ear. Keep hold of my shoulder.”
“Got it,” she whispered.
With his train established, Constantine forming the locomotive, he set out at a creep, listening with his ears and feeling with his left hand along the wall. Was all of this necessary? He could not say. All he could say was that he preferred not to be seen before he saw, and he had no infrared light sources, nothing that would make the world bright for his goggles without giving away his presence and location to the unaided. This would be the last time he traveled without his own.
The light reflecting off the wall at the end of the corridor flared brightly and then faded again to a dull green. There was no sound associated with the change, and it was a smooth, long pulse, as if someone had turned up a rheostat for a moment and then turned it down again. Constantine had the distinct impression that he was seeing a diffuse reflection of light from the outside, probably coming in through a window some distance away from the turn in the hall. The headlight of a passing vehicle or the sweep of a police searchlight could produce a pulse in ambient illumination like that.
As darkness returned, Constantine paused.
“Bottom of the door,” he said. The crack under the nearest apartment door was visible to him as a green glow.
“I see it,” said Raines.
“Stay here.” Constantine detached himself from his train and moved ahead more quickly to the bend. It turned out not to be a bend, but yet another three-way junction, mischaracterized by optical illusions in his goggles. He looked to the left, and far down at the other end he saw the open window—or rather, the one window that had not been fully papered over. Light was spilling in through that gap in the paper and was providing ambient light which, by the time it bounced and filtered its way down to this intersection and around the corner, was nothing a human being could see without sophisticated amplifying technology. To the right, the corridor was fully blacked out with paper over the windows. He made his way by feel back to his two companions.
“Windows have all been covered,” he whispered into the microphone on Raines’s headset. “I think we’re in the right place. You know the word for ‘backup?’”
“I know the word for ‘assistance,’” she replied.
Constantine moved around her, feeling for the policeman and patting his radio. “Bring backup. Call them.” Behind him, Raines repeated what sounded to Constantine like just the word ‘assistance,’ except spoken with an accent. The policeman seemed to get the idea, though, because he began making a quiet but urgent speech into his radio. Constantine, meanwhile, took Raines and positioned her and himself by the door with the light filtering under it. Once again, he took a moment to listen.
“You smell that?” asked Raines.
He sniffed. He did smell that. “Burning.”
“We need to go in,” she said.
“Dangerous.”
“They’re burning evidence!” she hissed at him.
Constantine gritted his teeth. He tested the door-knob. It was cold. He turned it and pressed on the door. It did not open.
“Locked,” he said. “Dead bolt.”
“God damn it,” she replied.
“You have an entry kit?”
“No, and we don’t have time!”
Light flared in the corridor. It was her laser. Just that little green dot was like a green-white lightbulb in their goggles.
“We need to go loud,” she said. “You know how to kick a door?”
“Honestly? I usually use a breaching charge.”
“Stand back, then.”
“Really? The police will be here in a minute.”
“If they’re burning documents, every second that goes by we lose intel. I’m fucking going in there.” She had stepped back across the hall, holding her weapon so that its laser illuminated her target. He saw her charge and plant her boot against the door just above the knob. Her kick resounded in the building like a sledgehammer blow, which made him wince, but to his amazement he saw that the door was no longer fully seated against its frame. Constantine shouldered against it and felt the damaged wood give way, heard it crack, and the door popped open. He stepped through and found himself in another, larger apartment.
“POLICE!” she shouted behind him. It made him wince even more than her door kick, but he reminded himself that this was not a military action. The native officer drove home that point by announcing them in a couple of other languages as well, at the top of his lungs.
There was no one immediately within, but there was light, at least enough of a glow from somewhere to make the interior bright for his goggles. As was his habit, he did not stop in the doorway but swept through and out of the way, scanning his surroundings and then behind the door for any sign of hostile presence. He found none, and Raines had slipped in behind him, covering down on the rest of the apartment with her weapon. The light here was enough that he could see her and the policeman easily, and he even turned his gain down a touch. To the policeman he gave his usual silent command, and the policeman nodded, taking up the rearguard position again. Constantine tapped his hand on Raines’s shoulder. “Your show,” he whispered. “Take point.”
“Mmmh,” she growled, but she did so, moving forward into the apartment, slipping into the first side door she found and shouting, “If anyone is in here, come out with your hands raised! Show yourself now!” Behind them, the local policeman bellowed what Constantine imagined were similar commands.
“Clear,” he heard her say in the first room. She reemerged and continued on, while Constantine watched every dark corner and every angle she had not—
“Hooooly shit,” he said aloud. They had found the main sitting room of the apartment, and someone had torn out most of the wall between it and the apartment next door, making a passage easily large enough to move furniture. Whoever had done the work had done it some time ago, it seemed, and had even swept the rubble and refuse into the corners.
By the naked eye, they could make out a dim orange glow in the next unit. Raines saw that and rushed in, doing her best to cover the angles while she sought for the source of the light. Constantine followed, abandoning stealth and turning on his light to ensure that no one was hiding in the shadows.
The locals had cut out more walls in this apartment, opening it to several others like a warren.
“Got it!” she said as she rounded a turn. He followed and found her stamping on a pile of papers and notes which were spilled across the floor there. Her boots were able to snuff the last of the flames.
“Good?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “There’s going to be more to find, though.”
“Hey!” shouted the policeman, from behind Constantine, and Constantine followed the beam of his light to a shape of a person with a shotgun taking cover at one of the makeshift portals. Constantine dove right as the shotgun boomed and flashed, and the policeman was already responding with a burst of automatic fire that seemed to shake the walls, despite its modest caliber. Constantine swapped to a lefthanded grip and eased as little of himself as possible out from behind cover, looking toward the point where the policeman’s rounds were rendering interior construction to dust. He could see nothing beyond chopped-down wall and the mess the policeman’s weapon was making of it. The policeman stopped shooting and shouted a command.
“Fack you!” a voice shouted from somewhere beyond the ragged opening in the wall.
“Throw out your weapon!” commanded Raines. “You are surrounded!”
Constantine thought, “Please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me,” as he threw himself across the policeman’s line of fire to the opposite side of the lane. There was another boom, accompanied by a rattle and shiver of raining plaster near his head and followed by another burst from the policeman’s submachinegun.
Once out of the enemy’s line of sight, he looked across at Raines. She seemed to be in good shape, huddling behind cover of her own. He eased out and took another look for their assailant.
Nothing. He had to be just out of sight behind the wall. Constantine made eye-contact with Raines and pointed, communicating his suspicion as best he could with a hooking gesture of his hand. She nodded.
He glanced back at the policeman and gave him a raised fist, and then pointed to Raines and made a sweeping gesture across the floor in front of the opening. She widened her eyes at him. He nodded and made the gesture again. Raines shook her head in resignation and began crawling across the floor as Constantine began firing bursts into the cinderblocks at the edge of the makeshift passage. These weapons would not penetrate cinderblock, but they would kick up plenty of frag and dust. Over his shoulder he gestured for the policeman to move up behind him as he continued to pepper his target.
She reached the opening in the wall and, to Constantine’s amazement, threw herself through it on her side, opening up with a long burst of fire.
“Fuck!” exclaimed Constantine, rushing forward to join her. He rounded the ragged cut-out in the wall, saw the man with the shotgun dying in the corner a few feet away, and then swept his weapon over that room and into the next. Keeping his gun trained ahead, he crouched down, took Raines by the vest, and lifted her to her feet with one hand. “Are you fucking insane?” he asked.
“What? I thought that’s what you wanted me to do!”
“No, I wanted you to get to the other side while I covered you! God damn!”
“Well, I didn’t know!”
He took a few hard breaths through his nose. “Come on.” He changed magazines and then eased around to the left, looking through an actual doorway into another room. Behind him, he heard her performing a tactical reload as well.
“Oh, shit,” he said, when he realized at what he was looking.
“What?”
“Money,” he said. The room on the other side of the door was small, containing only a single table on which were piled stacks of currency.
“What?”
“Money! Lots of money.”
She looked in, said, “Huh,” and then moved on. He followed.
“Body,” she said, stepping through yet another cut hole into yet another apartment. She knelt down next to the figure while he swept the rest of the room. “Dead,” she added.
“Shot?”
“Can’t tell,” she said, moving around to the other side of him. “Oh! Yeah. Small caliber, right to the face.” She knelt. “Not warm, but not in rigor yet.” At last she stood up and took up her weapon again. Constantine frowned at the corpse. How did this fit into the narrative?
“This place is a maze,” said Constantine. “Lots of angles. Keep your eyes up.” It was as much a general complaint about the situation as it was advice from him to her.
It was a maze, though. Truly, a warren, perhaps even a hive. The apartments of the top floor had been connected into a single complex of chambers by the cutting of large holes through many of the walls, leaving private only a few rooms here and there. These did look lived-in, aside from the one that had been used to secure the money. The place was cluttered, messy, but not filthy. There were cleaning supplies, including brooms and mops, visible here and there, and signs of laundry having been done by hand in tubs. Constantine needed the better part of a minute to lay his finger on the right simile, but he got there: it seemed to him like a refugee camp. Not quite a squatters’ slum, but not quite civilized, either. In operation, he suspected this place would have seemed destitute, and maybe hopeless, but not quite squalid. There was no human waste in the corridors. He had been places where that had been prevalent. He also did not smell the stench of human filth, here. There was a rotten smell to it, but it was not the rot of flesh or feces. It was something else which he could not identify, though it contributed to the eerie atmosphere.
Constantine always found it helpful to remind himself that he was the monster in the shadows. He was a professional monster in the shadows.
Raines snapped her fingers and pointed. A closed door, which looked to open toward them. She approached it and set her left hand on the knob, holding her submachinegun to her shoulder with her right hand. Constantine moved to her side and put his hand on the doorknob in her stead. He stretched toward the wall, so as to put as little of himself before the door as possible, while she backed up a step, taking a two-handed position on her weapon. She nodded, and he turned the knob and pulled open the door. She leaned around the corner.
Raines did not shoot, and no one shot at her, which was a relief to Constantine. “Mmmm,” she said, contemplative.
“What?” asked Constantine, swinging the door the rest of the way open so that he too could look inside.
The chamber beyond the door was full of women, huddled together. He guessed twenty or thirty.
“No weapons,” observed Raines. “The plot thickens.”
The policeman took a look in and then immediately began speaking into his radio.
“What’s going on here?” asked Constantine. “Human trafficking?”
“Among other things. This is a major operation.”
Elsewhere, they heard faint shouts, announcements as more policemen entered the floor from some remote vector. Raines looked in that direction, and then she turned and continued her hunt. “Come on.”
“Be careful,” said Constantine. “We don’t know how many are still here.”
“I know.”
She took the next door handle, letting Constantine clear the doorway as she opened it, and then she followed him into a narrow corridor.
“Service passage?” she whispered.
He put a finger to his lips, and they made their way along it to the next break in the wall, using their lights in intermittent pulses when the ambient glow from their laser dots was not quite sufficient. They found an opening, and Raines cast a brief flash into the next room. Constantine heard her breath catch in her throat as her light went out. Constantine turned and came over her shoulder with his weapon but saw no threat. He turned his light on just as she powered hers again.
The room contained seven bodies, all adult males, all armed, and all in a condition that struck the heart cold. One lay on his back against a chair, gashed open from his shoulder to his navel so deep that they could see rib bone clearly with their goggles. One had had his head bashed in—literally bashed in, so that a good third of his skull was now a deep, irregular crater. Another’s head had been turned too far around. One had a broken back, two others broken limbs. In all cases the breaks were so severe that the men looked like dropped marionettes, bent in all the wrong directions at their joints. Of the two with broken limbs, one of those had also been shot repeatedly, and the other had an assault rifle pushed through him, front to back, like a spear. The last was lying— hanging, really—with his head through the wall, embedded there, and bullet holes in his back.
The far door of the room was closed and locked, and a table had been pushed up against it.
Raines had started breathing again, and she was forcing herself to catalogue the scene before her with her weaponlight. The policeman caught up to them, took a look, and then turned away, putting a hand over his mouth.
“Allies, huh?” he said. He knew she was thinking what he was thinking, when it came to suspects. For his part, Constantine did not want to admit it, but a deep, deep part of himself was beginning to doubt his earlier conclusion, as to the humanity of their mystery actor.
“Let’s go around,” she said. “We need to preserve evidence.”
If it was forensics she wanted, this chamber was certainly a smorgasbord. They found another gap into an adjacent room, and he slipped through first, secured the other side, and then waited for her. They continued to explore, though he could tell what they had just found had shocked her. It had shocked him, and he had witnessed a scene or two of carnage over the years. His prior experience only meant that he could set it aside more quickly.
“Hey,” he said. She was reaching for a doorknob absently. She paused, glanced back at him, and shook her head to clear it. With renewed care she stepped aside and flattened herself against the wall, leaving one hand on the knob and waiting for him to take up the shooter’s position. When he nodded, she turned the knob and pulled the door.
Several shots rang from within and knocked the door into splinters, kicking it the rest of the way open in the process. At the same time, Constantine crouched and leaned into view, stitching the man inside with a dozen rounds in under two seconds. Several of them struck him in the face and laid him back against the bowl of the toilet on which he had been seated, fully clothed, apparently hiding.
Constantine stood up and took a breath. Adrenaline was buzzing hard inside him. This was the sort of thing he lived for, but it was still extremely scary. He looked at Raines and found that she was also staring at the dead man. That was enough of a reminder to drive Constantine to scan his surroundings again. His mantra was, “There’s always another bad-guy.” It was easy to forget in the immediate aftermath of a killing, especially when one’s blood was already running high.
“I’m starting not to like this place,” said Raines, to her credit affecting more calm than she obviously felt. He could see her shaking.
“I know. We can pull out any time.”
“No. Besides, look,” she said, gesturing with her laser. Computers. This room contained desktop computers which seemed to be in working order. Their chasses stood unmolested under a table.
“This is the sort of thing we’ve been looking for.”
The policeman placed another radio call. Raines closed her eyes and made a tight fist with her free hand, held it for a moment, and then took up her weapon again and advanced. “Come on. Let’s keep going. I can hear another squad getting close.”
Constantine watched her go and shook his head. “Tough lady,” he thought. If she decided she wanted some help, later, relieving the strain of the night, he would not leave her hanging.
They pushed into another room and she stopped and held up a hand. She had pulsed her light and then turned it on steadily again, and Constantine and the policeman followed suit.
“What the hell?” he asked.
The smell was strong, here. Several rooms had been converted into what looked like an extended commercial kitchen, with hot plates, pots, bottles, jars, and pipes. Cables ran across the floor to power the hot-plate burners. More accoutrement had been set up by the sink of an actual kitchen connected to this area.
“What is that? Ammonia?”
“Meth. It’s a fucking meth lab—weapons down!” she snapped, pushing his muzzle down and then moving to the policeman and pushing his gun down as well. He looked at her, and she said, “Methamphetamine? You know methamphetamine?” She pantomimed an expansive explosion with her hands and made the appropriate sound effect, and he got the picture. He backed out of the room hastily, making another transmission on his radio.
Constantine, meanwhile, had stepped forward to get a better look. He had never seen a meth lab before. He did not associate them with foreign countries. Horticultural narcotics, sure, but… It left him shaking his head.
“Rob,” said Raines, “let’s go. We need to close this off.”
That was true. He turned—and froze. A clutching shock went through him.
She stared at him.
Constantine lifted his weapon. “Stay still,” he whispered.
“Wha…” he saw her mouth, and then he saw understanding come to her. Above the nose her face was hidden behind her goggles, but something in her posture, in the way her mouth froze, partially open, in the way she once again stopped breathing, communicated her dawning comprehension.
His weapon’s laser traced a path, ever so slowly, up one side of her body and over her head. The broader beam of its light flooded her, painting her in cold green-white hues in his goggles. It was there, behind her. Constantine had seen it in the bend of her shadow across the wall. Even now he could see it distorting the way her shadow moved as he moved his torch, and the way the disk of light played over the texture of the wall. He could see the wall, but he could also see the shape. He kept his finger off the trigger, and with his left hand released his weapon, holding his palm toward her—and it—in a gesture of calm which he absolutely did not feel.
“Step forward,” he said to her, again quietly, not so much because it might not hear as to keep himself from giving in to the instinct to shout.
It was there, and he could see it, even though his light seemed to shine through it, in places, as though it had no depth. Constantine’s heart pounded. It couldn’t be real, and yet he was staring right at it.
Raines stepped forward, gripping her weapon hard, and very slowly she turned her head, looking past her googles, out the corner of her eye, at the place on the wall which he was illuminating.
Almost as a premonition, Constantine realized what was about to happen. “No—” he snapped.
An involuntary groan of horror escaped her, and all of her muscles moved at once, spinning her around and bringing up her submachinegun.
Constantine flicked off his safety and fired in an instant, but the thing had already moved, the way a refracted light flits across a wall with but a turn of the prism. Raines’s body plowed into Constantine and sent him sprawling. Their multiple gunshots rattled the room.
Constantine exerted all his will to focus as he fell back, trying to track the thing’s passage. It was like an invisible apparition, and it was like a demon, a completely black shape going by them, and somehow it was like both at once, or else his mind could not distinguish one moment from the next. A few more rounds escaped his gun but hit only wall board and cinderblocks. He saw it vanish into a corridor, leaving several gashes in the wooden doorframe there where it planted its claws to redirect itself.
“Stop shooting,” said Raines breathlessly. “The lab. Explosion.”
“Fuck,” said Constantine. He sat up, lifting her up as well. It had hit her like a truck. His mind had recorded the moment she had come off her feet, the moment her figure had doubled up like a ragdoll struck in its middle. There had been no time of flight. She had crumpled, crossed the distance airborne, and struck him almost like a truck herself, all seemingly in the same moment, and only his greater mass had spared him being knocked senseless.
“I panicked…” she was saying. “I’m sorry.” She choked for a moment. “Panicked.” She was not looking at him, now, but was staring past him.
“Oh, shit,” he said, scrambling to get out from under her and lay her down. There was blood coming from her mouth and nose.
“Sorry,” she said again, her breath coming in short gasps. “I think I’ve…” She convulsed again. “…been shot.”
“Shit shit shit shit,” said Constantine, now tearing her vest off. He could not see her through his goggles clearly; the focal distance was wrong, and she was just a blur. He unclipped his helmet and tossed it away, relying on his natural vision by the white blaze of the light attached to his carbine hanging off to one side, as he ripped free the hook-and-loop cummerbund around her waist and threw the front panel of her armor up over her head.
She stopped convulsing and stared.
“FUCK!” he shouted. She was not breathing. He began CPR. No one bothered with CPR on the battlefield; they didn’t even teach it as part of combat casualty care. He began the chest compressions and felt her broken ribs giving way sickeningly with each thrust. That was why: mechanisms of injury. If a battlefield injury stopped your heart, chances were overwhelming that the associated trauma was catastrophic, and CPR would be futile. Plus, it ate up a second man. Once one began CPR, one could not stop until medical rescue arrived, if the procedure was to have any chance at all of succeeding.
Constantine was still giving chest compressions and breaths, exhausted from the effort and fueled at that point by sheer anger, when the SWAT squad arrived. Their field medic took over, gave her a quick looking over, put a tube down her nose and a mask over her face, and continued compressions while an assistant worked the bellows on the mask, driving air into her. Another medic joined them and began cutting her clothes away. Several officers took hold of Constantine and dragged him up. He could barely hear them through the haze of his rage, and he could not understand their words anyway. When they started to pull him back he fought them off.
One of them was in his face, shouting at him angrily, urgently, pointing toward the door. The medics had rearranged Raines now, folded her arms over her, and, with a sudden burst of effort, they dragged her across the floor and into a corridor.
The lab. That was what they were worried about.
Constantine grabbed her plate carrier and then stood up, shook off the SWAT officers again, and stalked after the others.
The police medics were still performing compressions when the paramedics reached her and put her on a stretcher, and the paramedics continued that work as they rushed her out to an ambulance. He tried to board with her, but several SWAT officers held him back and closed the doors as the ambulance pulled away. There was another man shouting at him, now, someone he found he could understand. “You must see doctors! Mister Constantine, you need medical exam. Come. Come here.”
“I’m fucking fine!” he roared.
“You are bleeding, Mister Constantine.”
Constantine blinked at the man, and then looked down at himself. “No I’m not.”
The man clapped Constantine on the thigh and then held up his hand. His fingers and palm were patchy with blood. “You are. Come.”
Constantine could not believe it. He could not believe any of this. They pulled him to another ambulance, where paramedics directed him to lie down on a stretcher, and they began to remove his gear and clothing. He too was soon loaded up and being shipped out.