CHAPTER EIGHT
David looked through the binoculars at the facility. He and Jayce were about a mile away, hidden in a stand of trees that grew just south of the former oil field. From here, David could see the security officers not visible on the satellite images Jayce had shown him.
“Looks like ten,” Jayce said.
“Ten? I only see four.”
“Sweep your field glasses over the whole facility, not just the gate.”
It took David a moment to remember that binoculars were called field glasses in the military.
He moved the binoculars across the property and found the other security officers Jayce was talking about.
A single pair at a side gate, and two patrolling pairs walking around the long central building.
The guards were armed with assault rifles and wore bulletproof vests.
“I’m guessing they don’t care to masquerade as an abandoned oil field anymore.”
“Oil fields often have armed guards,” Jayce explained. “If people saw this, they’d just assume that the company struck paydirt again, and they’re getting ready to pull.”
David looked at Jayce incredulously. Armed guards? At a civilian business in the United States?
He was about to ask why, but it didn’t really matter for their mission.
He just realized how little he knew about the world, or rather how sheltered his own world was.
Or had been before Sierra walked into his exam room.
Even before when serial killers threatened and nearly killed him twice, it hadn’t hit him this hard.
Because they weren’t normal. I could convince myself I was just unlucky and things weren’t usually like that.
“Heads up,” Jayce said. “We’ve got company.”
David’s heart dropped to his feet. He swung the binoculars wildly, looking for the approaching enemy.
Jayce grabbed his wrist and gently pushed the binoculars to the right until David saw a convoy of trucks approaching from a service road to the east. He reddened slightly.
“Oh. You mean people are approaching the base.”
“Yes. Not us. And the guards are all coming to the front to see what’s going on. Which suggests poor training which suggests these are garden variety CIA toughs, not Marines and definitely not SOG. That is very good news.”
“What’s SOG?” David asked.
“CIA special forces. Very dangerous. They recruit from the Green Berets, Delta Force, and SEAL Team Six. Think of the most dangerous person you’ve ever met. Those guys are more dangerous.”
David thought of Franklin West, the first of the two serial killers he’d encountered. West wasn’t much to look at: slim, on the shorter side, thinning hair already in his thirties. He’d nearly beaten David to death, though, and grinned through the whole process.
He had no frame of reference for people who were dangerous in the military sense. Once more, it struck him how utterly in over his head he was.
“Oh shit,” Jayce said. “Okay, don’t freak out.”
David frowned. “Why? What’s…”
His voice trailed off when he saw what was leaving the trucks, or rather who.
Dozens of dogs were led from the vehicles.
They moved calmly but in stilted fashion, as if they were marionettes of dogs rather than actual animals.
Handlers stood nearby, watching them intently as they walked into the building.
David looked closely for Colonel Chastain, the head of the 93rd Testing Brigade, and Staff Sergeant Miranda Whitaker, the handler of Asset Sierra-9, the dog whose behavior and scars had first tipped David off to the terrifying “work” being done by the brigade.
He didn’t see them, and the dogs were too far away for him to identify Sierra clearly. He counted fifteen German Shepherds out of almost fifty dogs, and any one of them could have been her.
Fifty dogs. Nearly four times the number he’d known about before.
“I told you,” Jayce said, once more seeming to read David’s mind. “They’re expanding.”
“Jesus. That fast?”
“They have a list of hundreds of dogs,” Jayce informed him. “They’ve got eyes all over the country looking for animals that exhibit certain characteristics that suggest they’d be good candidates for the project.”
“Why don’t they just breed their own dogs?”
“That’s the goal eventually. They’re still not entirely sure which genes cause dogs to possess the right traits.
David looked at Jayce. It occurred to him that he still didn’t know what Jayce did for the 93rd. “What was your job?”
“I compared test results and assigned scores,” he replied.
“Dogs would be given a treatment plan designed to enhance their telepathic potential. At different stages, we’d test them for that potential and assign scores.
I was the one who looked at those results and assigned the scores.
Well, I was one of the people who would do that. I was assigned to the Sierra series.”
David knew about most of what Jayce was talking about, but the parts he didn’t know piqued his curiosity. “What’s the Sierra series?”
“So, the assets were grouped in five different series: Alpha, Charlie, Hotel, Mike, and Sierra. The Alphas were all prototypes. That series concluded years ago. They were basically just so we could get the formulas right. Charlie was the second set of prototypes. We used them to fine tune the process. Hotel, Mike, and Sierra are the actual test series. Dogs with high obedience scores are assigned to Hotel. Dogs with high physical scores are assigned to Mike. Dogs with exceptional cognitive abilities go to Sierra.”
David’s stomach turned hearing dogs described as tools like that. “When did it occur to you that these were living, breathing, thinking beings and not just different kinds of screwdrivers for you to play with?”
Jayce turned to him. “I knew the moment I was given this job that what I was doing was immoral. I also knew I would die if I resisted or protested my orders. I told myself that I was doing this for my country, that as brutal as this was, it was for a good cause. I knew better, though. I just didn’t want to die. ”
He smiled softly. “Then you came along. A civilian. A real civilian. Someone whose ass I could effortlessly kick.”
Lovely to hear that, David thought drily.
“And you inspired me,” Jayce said. “You showed me that it’s possible to be brave. If you can risk your life, then I can. I can do the right thing.”
He looked back at the base. The animals were all inside now. The guards were talking with the drivers, who lounged against the backs of their trucks. A few smoked cigarettes while the rest just lounged. One of them threw her head back and laughed at something one of the guards said.
“What’s the plan?” David asked. “It’s probably not likely that another convoy of vehicles will show up and distract everyone from their posts.”
“No, it’s not,” Jayce agreed, “but the way they have security set up leaves them vulnerable from the north. We can enter from that side under cover of darkness, and we have a good shot of reaching the building before patrolling security sees us.”
“And we’re just going to morph through the electric fence?”
Jayce chewed on his lip. “That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet. Maybe if I short out the fence but make it really obvious that it came from one side, we can pull security that way and leave the other side open. I don’t know. I have to think about it.”
“How can you short out the fence?”
“I have to think about that too.”
David frowned and looked back at the facility.
Security was returning to their original posts.
He was beginning to lose his excitement for the coming infiltration.
Jayce was well-meaning, but like David, his capabilities were limited in scope.
He might be able to kick David’s ass, but if they ran into a pair of guards armed with assault rifles, it wouldn’t matter that they were just normal CIA toughs and not SOG super soldiers.
But Sierra was in there. And if Turk was in there, David wouldn’t hesitate.
“Whatever happens, I’m with you,” he told Jayce.
Jayce looked at him with wide-eyed admiration that made David feel uncomfortable. He clapped David on the shoulder and said, “You’re a good man, David. I really hope you survive this.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Jayce got to his feet and thrust his chin back at the van, which was parked behind a thick stand of desert oaks. “Let’s get out of here. We have our way in now. We just need to figure out how to make it work for us.”
David drove the van back while Jayce pondered their strategy.
This van was the third vehicle Jayce had procured, including the one he’d rented to kidnap David and abandoned just outside of Quantico.
It was equipped with a suspension lift and offroad tires that didn’t seem to make any noticeable difference to the ride other than causing the vehicle to sway terrifyingly around corners both off and on road.
When David reached pavement and didn’t need to focus every ounce of his concentration on driving, he asked, “Did you ever have a dog growing up?”
Jayce shook his head. “Guinea Pig. Captain Commodore.”
David lifted an eyebrow and looked at the younger man.
Jayce grinned. “Yep. I must have been four or five when I named him. I just thought those words sounded cool. Like a superhero. I used to draw pictures of him wearing a cape saving people from evil animals like rattlesnakes, wasps, and scorpions. Mostly things that stung. My dad told me I got stung by a wasp when I was like two or three, so that’s probably why I hated them so much. ”
David smiled, imagining little Jayce playing with his guinea pig, pretending to be the superhero team of soft-bodied creatures everywhere avenging themselves against things with fangs and barbs. “I’ll bet you had a lot of fun adventures with Captain Commodore.”
“I did. He was a good little piggie. Lived a long time too for a guinea pig. Eleven years.”
“Wow. That is long.”
“Yeah. I was fifteen when he died. I had a funeral for him in our backyard. I’m pretty sure the little gravestone I made for him is still out there.” His smile faded. “Sure, wish he was here now. I could use a superhero.”
David thought of Turk, Faith’s brave, strong superhero. He’d risked his life more than once to keep her alive. It occurred to him that for all his years as a vet, he’d never bonded that closely with an animal. He wondered what it would be like. Maybe if he rescued Sierra…
But that was for later. The job had to be done first before he thought about what came next.
If he survived to see what came next. Children could believe in heroic guinea pigs and eternal life. Adults had to bury their dead pets in the backyard and face the reality that heroes died just as often as villains and evil sometimes triumphed over good.
But you fought anyway. Whether you won or lost, you fought. And if fate decided that they were going to lose this fight, David hoped that Faith would think of him with pride and not just grief.
Still, as he pulled into the parking lot of their hotel, he prayed to whoever was listening that he would come home to her when this was all said and done.