Chapter Forty
White Ravens
Scar
Outside the window of their modest three-star motel on Colima’s outskirts, palms and bright plazas sat under the silhouettes of its famous volcanoes.
The mission location looked tropical from a distance and smelled of warm pavement, humid earth, and the bright bite of tropical leaves.
It was a pretty view, but it was the stark opposite of a place to vacation.
Colima’s beauty masked a reputation for cartel drug routes, trafficking territory wars, and violence that sprang-up without warning.
Scar didn’t give a damn about the sights or statistics.
He cared about success.
On the table was the identical drive, a corrupted decoy of fake information, built to make the foreign cartel leader believe he’d been betrayed by the United States DEA agent who was trading classified information in exchange for half a million dollars.
He and Gage’s job was to retrieve it, swap it, and burn the alliance, as quietly and covertly as possible.
Their threat class was Alpha, meaning there was an unlikely chance of counterattack, but not impossible.
Scar slid the decoy disk between his gloved fingers.
“Scar, you got a three-minute blackout window to get inside and up to the third floor,” Roz informed him. “From there, the guards are on a two-minute rotation.”
Scar shut the small case. “Plenty of time.”
Roz opened his mouth as though he wanted to tell him not to get cocky, but he’d seen him steal before.
He stood behind Gage, close enough to feel his heat.
“You ready, Saint?” he asked.
Gage turned his head slightly. “I’ll keep you safe, don’t worry.”
“I won’t.”
Behind him, the field team’s voices sounded in his earpiece.
“Field to Command,” the lead said. “Confirm green on feeds and mainframe control.”
A few seconds passed.
“You’re green,” Command replied. “Reading you loud and clear.”
Roz nodded at Scar and Gage. “You’re green.”
Scar waited for their field snipers to take out the guards at the back entrance. When their bodies dropped, he and Gage slipped inside and cut straight for the stairwell.
He stayed tight on Gage’s heels, mouth near his ear, guiding him to the third floor exactly how they’d trained for weeks.
“Two steps…one eighty curve right, stairs in three, rails left, ten up…landing, ninety-degree right.”
Gage shifted on his whispers with the stealth of a panther, silent and precise.
At the final landing, he pressed his forehead to Gage’s for a split second, then vanished to into position.
He kept his head down as he walked toward a tired-looking hotel maid stocking her housekeeping cart, spotting the keycard clipped to the pocket of her smock.
Scar increased his pace as she bent to add some linen to the middle shelf. He brushed past her, barely grazing her right arm.
With two fingers, he pinched the keycard clip and slid it free.
“Oh, sorry,” he muttered, never breaking stride.
Scar didn’t stop or look back as he stuffed the keycard into his pocket.
“You’ve got forty-five seconds to clear,” Roz said in his ear.
Scar listened at the target’s door.
Six men inside: a traitor, a thug, and four guards. One American, polished and selling secrets, the other Spanish, celebrating and trading violence.
He waited for the laughs to crest, to cover the sound of him inserting the card in the door scanner and ducking inside five seconds before the guards turned the corner.
Scar checked the outer room before he walked around the wall divider.
Six heads turned his way with confusion in their eyes, then shock, but it was too late as he pulled his suppressed dart pistol.
A two-stage dart with an instant knockdown agent, followed by a slow-release sedative that would keep them out cold long past extraction.
He had a six-round dispenser, none to waste on a miss.
He fired all of them— the pops no louder than a breath—in rapid succession.
He dropped the guards first, and they went down harder than drugged elephants.
The disloyal American tried to speak, his eyes blown wide, as he slumped sideways in his chair.
The cartel lord surged halfway up in an attempt to fight through the fog.
Scar squatted, watching the man’s eyes roll behind his lids before his spine gave and he folded to the carpet.
“You better be glad my partner’s a saint. Otherwise, I would’ve put two bullets in the back of your skull and not lost a wink of sleep tonight.”
Scar began rummaging through the American’s bag. He found the disk and made the swap.
“Swap complete.” Scar said.
“Copy that,” Command answered.
He paused at the sound of boots, heavy and purposeful, coming his way.
His comm clicked.
Roz’s voice was clear and composed like a handler’s should be.
“Saint. You got four moving in his direction.”
“Hard copy,” Gage answered calmly.
Scar’s heart pounded at the thought of Gage fighting four drug lord guards, but he stayed focused on gathering the rest of the intel.
He trusted Gage, and his partner had proven time and again that he didn’t need saving.
White Ravens
Gage
“Four targets, twenty feet and closing,” Roz instructed.
Gage stood motionless and listened, shutting his body down—his breath, his pulse, even the rhythm of his heart—until it went quiet enough to hear his environments rhythm.
He could hear four sets of footsteps in the hallway near the room Scar was raiding.
Gage angled his head and let the corridor describe them.
He timed their cadences, assessing each man by the way their boots hit the carpet.
One moved with long, sluggish strides that landed hard—meant the man was tall and muscular. He’d probably fight with his brawn, instead of wits.
The two in the back were lighter on their feet, strides even longer than their leader’s. They were tall and lithe, the kind of men who utilized their speed in a fight.
The lone one on the left had clipped steps that were close together and aggressive. He was in a crew of giants, suffering from a short-man complex. He’d fight with misplaced, projected anger trying to prove himself.
Gage kept his back pressed to the wall, reached into his pocket, removed his Sound Ghost Beads, and scattered them a few feet in front of him.
Roz counted them down. “Contact in four, three, two,… ”
With a muted snap, the cane telescoped outward, locking into a six-foot length of hardened titanium.
The first man stepped on the bead closest to the baseboard, the crack sounding like a knuckle popping in a silent room.
Gage leaped from behind the wall with full momentum, whipped his cane around in a low arc, and slammed the shaft into the guard’s knee.
The crack reverberated as the patella shattered under the force.
The man hollered loud enough to be heard in the lobby as his leg collapsed, sending him down sideways.
The sluggish ones hand went to his leather holster. Before he could pull whatever he had, Gage reversed his swing and drove his cane upward, connecting with his elbow.
The joint popped with a sickening crunch, but Gage didn’t give him a chance to fully register the pain before he slammed the shaft into his throat, the damage immediate and eliminating his ability to scream.
Something blunt and metal clattered to the ground before the guard crumpled at his feet.
Gage stepped over him as if he were yesterday’s trash, moving fast, rotating his cane in distraction, and closing the distance as his beads popped, sketching his battlefield in sound.
The one with the complex fired a hasty shot, the bang echoing off the wall.
He drove the cane into smaller man’s stomach, folding him over and stealing his breath, before he hooked him behind the knee.
He hit the carpet with a muffled thud, and before he could think of getting up, Gage yanked his taser baton from behind his back and shoved it into his target’s chest and let the shock of fifty thousand volts put him to sleep.
The last tall one hung back, heart pounding audibly, his pistol trembling in a two-handed grip.
Gage snapped his cane up in a blur of silver and connected with the guard’s wrist, followed by an instant horizontal swing to the right side of his face.
The weighted end connected with the man’s cheek, slamming his head into the wall, the upper jawbone cracking like porcelain, sending multiple teeth skittering across the floor in a spray of blood, spit and fragments.
He dropped, choking on his own blood. Gage left him on the floor, wheezing, curled in the fetal position and regretting his life’s decisions.
The one with the shattered thigh lunged in one last attempt, grabbing at his jacket with his free hand.
Gage twisted away and stomped on the hand that’d dared to touch him, crunching the tiny bones like twigs.
The guard screamed louder, too loud.
Gage dropped behind him, cinching his forearm under his chin with measured pressure—not to kill him, but to shut him up.
The man gagged and bucked once, twice, before the fight drained out of him, leaving him silent and limp.
Gage got back into position, hidden in an alcove, head angled.
Four minutes later, Scar’s voice came over the comms. “We’re done.”
That was his cue. He went around the long way to the back stairwell. By the time he got to the door, Scar appeared at his side as if he’d been there the whole time.
His strong hand found his wrist and squeezed once. Good work.
He returned the pressure. You too.
The extraction was efficient and fast.
The rear door was held open, and the four warriors who made up their tactical escort in the field formed a moving shield around them as they rushed toward their armored vehicle.
Inside Gage exhaled, long and slow.
He, Scar, and their team would be long gone by the time the men upstairs woke up. Neither would know who betrayed who, only that the deal and any trust within their alliance was destroyed.
Their field team decided to leave the scene as is. Colima was so overtaken with violence, authorities wasn’t going to use their limited resources to investigate a few assaulted bodies left mangled in a run-down hotel hallway.
The mission control room was more relaxed now that the adrenaline and concentration had drained out of it.
The real drive holding the classified information was placed in a protective sleeve and loaded into a secured crate by their field chain-of-custody handler.
Nobody spoke about morality and what it took to retrieve the drive, or about the guards Gage had put down and the injuries he’d inflicted.
He didn’t flinch at what his hands had done, didn’t see a need for repentance.
His fighting wasn’t fueled by hatred or vengeance. He was driven by devotion to stand between predators and their victims.
A traitor inside the DEA was selling their agency’s defense strategies for money, helping to shield cartels that poisoned communities and trafficked innocent lives.
If he had to break a wrist, a couple ribs, a jaw, and a few kneecaps to stop that kind of evil, he felt it justified.
Roz approached him. “You good?”
“I’m good,” he nodded as his gear chief stripped him of his kit and stored his weapons for return to headquarters.
Roz squeezed his shoulder. “You were a true soldier tonight, G. You’ve come a long way from that timid kid on the block.”
“You too, brother…you too.”
The rest of the field team packed and left in stages, their voices and footsteps fading down the hall.
Before he could go to Scar, a new set of footsteps arrived—smooth and silent to the common ear.
Outside the door, a deep voice reported in. “White shadow cover is live.”
“Handsome,” Scar said from across the room.
Gage followed the sound of his even breaths until he connected with Scar’s chest.
“Your stuff is already packed. Go change.”
Gage chuckled. “Into what?”
Scar touched his cheek. “Something comfortable, we have a two-hour flight.”
Gage slowly eased out of Scar’s arms and went to do as he’d been told.