Chapter 1
YOU CAN HEAR THE BULLET
He’d carved out a small hole in the plas-glass that the muzzle of his rifle with its suppressor could easily fit through.
The windows on the floor he’d chosen and the levels directly above and below had been darkened against the midday sun, helping to hide his activities from any prying eyes.
The desk he leaned against was sturdy enough to hold his weight and the weight of his sniper rifle resting on its low tripod.
What passed for a mid-January winter storm had swept through the area last night, warm rain driving what smog the pollution filtration towers hadn’t sucked up yet all the way to the ground.
It left the skies partly cloudy but the air clear, allowing for clear LOS, and Kyle would take that over the height of muggy, smoggy summer any day of the week.
As far as missions went, this was one of the easier ones.
Filling in for Delta Team on a last-minute basis wasn’t difficult.
Wetwork in general was messy, but sometimes it was easy.
A street two kilometers away passed through the crosshairs and mil dots in his scope as Kyle scanned the area around a cluster of warehouses that was their target’s probable destination.
He saw no movement aside from a few joggers.
On a Sunday afternoon in the business district, there wasn’t much activity to begin with, which was probably why their target had chosen the location.
It made Kyle’s job simpler in the sense that he wouldn’t have to factor in too many civilians getting in the way, though it’d been a bitch to find an angle that wouldn’t require him to shoot through Los Angeles’ notorious ground and aerial traffic.
“Are we sure the target is supposed to show?” Kyle asked over the encrypted comms Alpha Team used in the field. The nanotech embedded beneath the skin around his ears amplified everyone’s voices a little as they came through the line.
“Analysts are ninety percent certain the buy will occur today, Reaper,” Sergeant Ekaterina Ovechkina replied using Kyle’s code name. When off the clock, she went by Katie, but in the middle of an op, she was their second-in-command and went by Viper.
The Metahuman Defense Force’s headquarters was located across the country in the Washington, DC, megacity, which was where Katie was coordinating today’s op.
Alpha Team consisted of eight metahumans, all with various skill sets.
It wasn’t unheard of for members of the team to break off into smaller squads.
It reminded Kyle a lot of how his old Strike Force team had functioned, which had made the transition from being a Special Forces operative into a fully fledged member of Alpha Team a lot easier, despite the initial mess that was his introduction.
“Not see likely suspects,” Staff Sergeant Alexei Dvorkin said, his Russian accent a hard scrape over the words as he peered through his high-powered binoculars at the city below them. “Only see tourists. Is not tourist area. Why they go there?”
“For the food, Inferno,” Madison Chan said cheerfully from outside the office. “All the taco trucks your heart desires.”
The team’s demolitions specialist was the only one in the field proper with them for this mission. Annabelle Brown, a former Night Stalker pilot, was on standby at Joint Forces Training Base within the Los Angeles megacity limits. She was their emergency exfil if things went spectacularly wrong.
Kyle lifted his head away from the scope, rubbing at his eyes.
He’d been hunched over his rifle for the better part of the day, only taking one break to use the toilet out in the hall and eat an energy bar while Alexei took over for him.
He and his adoptive older brother had been paired together as a scout sniper team for years with Strike Force, though Kyle was the better shot by far.
Alexei was good, but he preferred being a spotter when they were in the field like this.
Alexei’s main skill, aside from being a pyrokinetic, was as a close-quarters combat specialist. Luckily, that skill hadn’t been needed to get them inside today.
A sudden malfunction of the building’s environmental system Katie had oh so helpfully broken by hacking the server resulted in a frantic, intercepted call for repairs by the building’s management.
The ruse enabled them to go in undercover as electricians so as to better hide their gear in bulky tool cases.
Katie had control of the security system and would wipe every trace of them from the system’s hard drives and servers once they cleared out.
While Alexei supported Kyle in the elimination of the target, Madison’s job was to deal with the security guards that periodically made the rounds.
They’d chosen her to do all the talking since she was originally from Los Angeles, and her voice wasn’t as distinctive as Kyle’s or Alexei’s.
She knew the local slang better than they did and was less intimidating on first glance, though Kyle would never be one to underestimate her.
Kyle had grown up in Boston, the son of a violent Irish Mob enforcer, before a retaliatory gang attack orphaned him at the age of thirteen.
Alexei’s family had fled a refugee city in Ukraine on a generational refugee asylum request and had finally been relocated to Boston three years prior to that fateful night.
They’d grown up as friends, and the Dvorkins had taken Kyle in and adopted him.
Everything about their ethnically Russian way of life had stuck with him long before he and Alexei joined the Army on a Special Forces contract.
“Should have taco truck here when we leave,” Alexei grumbled. “Buy on way out.”
“Y’all better bring me some grub if you do, or y’all are walkin’ home,” Annabelle said over the comms. “All twenty-five hundred plus miles.”
“Copy that, Icarus,” Madison said with a laugh as she came back into the office.
Kyle gave her a thumbs up before fitting his eye against the scope again, staring through its high magnification.
He couldn’t get a read on wind speed since they weren’t outdoors, but Alexei was feeding him weather updates every few minutes from the sensor they’d placed outside on the window and would give him a steady stream of information once the target showed up.
If the target showed up.
The Federación Cartel was one group of a loosely bound global alliance of criminal enterprises the MDF had discovered was attempting to create metahumans for their own use through torturous human experiments performed across multiple countries.
The breakthrough came last summer, and since then, the MDF and their affiliates in other countries were playing catch-up when they couldn’t afford to if they wanted to keep the public safe.
The only thing that could turn a human into a metahuman was Splice, a toxic chemical created by terrorists for use in war over a hundred years ago.
The nonpersistent, highly volatile chemical began as a liquid before vaporizing quickly.
Whether absorbed through the skin or inhaled, the cytotoxicity of Splice was deadly to humans.
It killed within hours through rapid catastrophic cellular collapse and had a ninety-five percent kill rate.
The remaining five percent of survivors were inherently immune to Splice, their bodies jumpstarting long-dormant junk DNA and changing them into metahumans.
No one knew which junk DNA was the catalyst for the change since each segment of junk DNA was different in every metahuman tested.
Neither did scientists know what environmental factors, if any, needed to come into play.
A viable vaccine had yet to be discovered, despite many companies trying to find a so-called cure over the years.
Considering governments had a monopoly on metahumans, it wasn’t a surprise criminals and terrorists were attempting to make and field their own.
War was big business and always would be.
“Got movement,” Alexei said suddenly. “Three SUVs, arrive southbound.”
Kyle adjusted the angle of his scope until he had the trio of vehicles in view once they cleared a building. “I see them.”
Kyle tuned everything else out except the steady drone of Alexei’s voice as he focused on the scene through his scope.
The SUVs pulled through the security gate that surrounded the tall warehouses.
He followed their route to the warehouse MDF analysts had tagged as the likely building the buy would go down in.
The scope Kyle was using automatically took photos every minute and transmitted them back to base; he upped the interval to every five seconds by pressing a button on the side of the scope.
“Second group come westbound,” Alexei said.
“Copy that,” Kyle replied.
The SUVs rolled to a halt, and people got out.
Kyle focused on the man exiting the middle SUV from the rear passenger seat, pegging him as the one in charge based on his suit alone.
Miguel Estrada was not part of the drug kingpin’s family who operated the Federación Cartel.
His Estrada Organization was merely one arm of it, overseeing the transportation of weapons over the Southern California border and down the desert roads that stretched between San Diego and the Los Angeles megacity.
His role as a ruthless weapons trafficker had thrust him to a level of wealth and status that should have meant these sort of deals were left to an underling.
Except he was here, which meant their intel was right, and whoever the buyer was, they had to be important.
“Target in sight,” Kyle said. “Do I have the green light?”
“Affirmative, Reaper. You have the green light,” Katie replied crisply.