Chapter 40
Arthur
Two dark utility vehicles, headlights off, approached Lance and me at the top of the lane. I checked my watch. Seven o’clock on the dot.
I’d picked this spot for the height of its hedges and the dead spot in its cell coverage—five minutes from the estate’s outer wall, but hidden from it by the hill.
Rain plinked off the gate rail beside me.
Fog had climbed the nearby cliffs since we’d parked, cutting our view to a short stretch of road.
The cover was thin, but the sun had set half an hour ago.
In those conditions, eight men could cross open ground as indistinct shapes.
The fog was on our side this time.
The fist that had been tightening around my heart for the past three and a half hours squeezed a little tighter. I didn’t try to push it aside. I held on to every ounce of fear for Gwen as a reminder: we had to get this right.
Emotional connections are dangerous.
Fuck yes, they were. But they were worth it.
A successful op was about motion, not emotion. Under normal circumstances, I ran an op with the right one. But tonight? I held onto the fear, and I wouldn’t let it go until I had her safely away from these people. Bravery was my currency tonight.
“I want you in overwatch,” I said to Lance. “North of the chapel. You’d own the whole west lawn.”
“Not a fucking chance.”
“You’re better on a scope than—”
“I’m going over the wall with you.” He didn’t raise his voice, and he didn’t reach for a joke, which from Lance was an answer all by itself. “She’s in there, Arthur. I’m not sitting on a hill.”
I patted his shoulder, part of me wanting to order him to stand down, part of me happy to have him with me.
The vehicles pivoted and parked nose-out, ready to leave in a hurry.
Doors opened, and eight men stepped out into the rain, easing them shut.
One of them nodded to me, but they immediately went to work.
Tailgates opened, and they kitted up in silence.
Suppressed carbines. Night optics. Flex cuffs by the bundle. Soft armor, radios, gloves.
The one who’d nodded waved us over to show us two extra sets of gear set apart from the rest. His eyes told me he was at least ten years my senior, but he clearly hadn’t skipped a gym day in a while.
“One,” he said, and tapped a small patch on his shoulder with the number. Black text on black kit, only visible up close. “And you can call them Two through Eight. Keeps the radios clean.”
I shook his hand. “You know the job?”
“We do,” One said. “Command is yours?”
“It is.”
He looked me up and down. He knew who his orders had come from, but did he know who I was? Would he complain about answering to Penn Jr.? Whatever he made of me, his answer was a nod. “Good.”
The men staged their gear in silence. Running teams of my own had taught me that the smallest habits were the most revealing. My father had sent veterans who’d worked together before.
In my first year on Task Force Legacy, my father’s word had put me in charge of men like these, and I’d spent every year since asking what I’d have been without his word. The fist squeezed around my heart, reminding me I had no time for those questions tonight.
For the next few minutes, Lance and I adjusted our vests, checked for rattles as we moved, and memorized the position of each piece of gear. One of the men—whose patch said he was Four—had two drones up before I’d found the med kit. Once we were done, Four waved us over to one of the vehicles.
“Four men outside.” Four had a rugged laptop open in the rear of the vehicle.
It mirrored the feeds from his control unit, alongside the architectural diagrams from my father.
“One rover walking a loop, roughly ninety seconds of blind time per circuit. Two static at the west doors, one on the east.”
“Windows?”
“Lit on the ground floor, south and west. And that.” He zoomed in. One bright room on the far side, which appeared to be a full kitchen. “Chow time.”
More good luck. “East wing?”
“Dark upstairs. One lamp on the ground floor, could be a hall light left on. The men at the doors haven’t moved. One just finished a cigarette.”
“So they’re bored,” Lance said.
“Bored men with a captive in the house.” I turned to the huddle.
“A place like this goes years without a bad night. Normally those men would be asleep on their feet. Tonight they’re holding someone, so assume they’re alert.
We have blueprints and two cameras in the sky, but we don’t have eyes inside the house. ”
Heads nodded around me.
“Plan A.” I laid out our approach, avoiding the kitchen—the drone feed didn’t show Gwen with them.
“We go in quiet, try to find her and get her out with as few contacts as possible. Lance and three men with me through the west service door. Two of you monitor the kitchen entry and move if needed. Your best two snipers on overwatch, one at the chapel rise and one at the hedgerow opposite. Four flies both birds from here. If they’re smart, they’ve put her upstairs, away from the exits. Treat it as a guess, not intelligence.”
“And Plan B?” asked One.
“Scare the shit out of them.”
“Rules of engagement?” One’s question told me these men were prepared to use lethal force.
“Nobody dies tonight. Anyone who fights, you put him down and cuff him. Anyone who runs, let the fog keep him.”
“Cuffs are risky.” One shifted his weight. “It means an alarm goes up faster, and we need to watch our backs as well as what’s in front of us.”
“I know the price. The rule holds. Nobody dies.”
He weighed that and frowned, but said, “Your op.”
“Count on five trained men at minimum. One of them came out of Pendragon—Rick Younge.” None of the men blinked at the name.
“He’ll know your playbook, because it used to be his.
If you meet a man who moves like you move, that’s him.
Don’t give him a fair fight. Everyone else is a noncombatant until they prove otherwise. ”
More nods.
“Last thing.” I approached Four’s laptop and pointed at the floor plan.
“We’ve got a safe room under the main hall.
If an alarm goes, they’ll likely fall back to it.
If they take her down with them, tonight turns into a siege we lose.
So quiet is critical. From the first man we put down, every check-in he misses is a clock running against us. ”
“Do we put a man on that door?” asked one of the men.
“It’s in the center of the house. It’s too risky. But if the night gets loud, that’s our target.”
“Timeline?” One asked.
“We move after the rover’s next call. That buys the longest gap he can give us.”
Three and Five shrugged into ghillie suits and disappeared into the dark, pieces of wet hedgerow carrying rifles.
“You know what this is, right?” Lance tightened his chin strap and pulled me aside. “The whole thing, start to finish?”
“A rescue.”
“You put yourself in your father’s debt for a woman you barely know.”
“I know.” I touched the pockets in the front of my carrier, reminding myself where everything was. “It’s love.”
“Took you long enough.” No grin with it this time. He gripped my shoulder once, hard. “Let’s go get her.”
I went first. My father had run a hundred nights like this from a warm room with a headset. If his men were going over a wall for me, I wasn’t doing it from the safety of cover and distance. I was going over it ahead of them. I set my hands on the coping and hauled myself over.
Light rain ticked on my helmet and wet grass soaked me to the knee.
The rover came around the hedge on his schedule. Two took his knees, I took his mouth, and Six had cuffs on him the second he was on the ground. Two pulled him—hooded, trussed, gagged, breathing—across the grass and out of sight of the house. Nobody died.
I unclipped the radio from his chest, yanked the coiled earpiece free, and handed them to Lance. He shoved the earpiece in and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Clock’s running,” I whispered over my team radio.
Our route passed below a bright room with stained-glass windows and bars—it must have held something important.
Two men held the western service door, splitting a dry patch under the overhang. They went down the same as the rover, fast and soft, and Six cuffed them back-to-back. We stripped the batteries from their radios and dragged the men across the lawn.
We filed into the dark corridor. Behind me came the click-click of someone keying a radio.
I glanced back.
Lance pointed at the rover’s radio and mouthed, ‘Kitchen. Food.’
The double-click usually meant the operator was too busy to answer. Did these men use the same signal?
Goddamn it.
We kept moving, pushing up the service staircase. We split at the top to check for a locked door with my woman behind it. I checked the first door while Lance headed down the hallway with Two.
The next door had a transom window over it, hanging wide open. None of the others were open. Why would this one be—
Lance stopped suddenly and signaled us to halt. Over comms, he whispered, “They’re talking to the rover on the radio.”
Fuck.
Whoever was waiting for the rover to respond would be suspicious if he whispered. If Lance spoke any louder, he might draw unwanted attention from someone inside.
“Goin’ fer a piss,” Lance replied with a horrible Cockney accent. The accent was shit, but the excuse might work. Anyone could have said it.
Was it enough?
Lance swiveled to face me from down the hallway. “We’re burned.”
Double fuck.
Doors banged. Men’s voices rose. My breath cut out, and my body swung toward the noise before I’d decided anything.
One raw half second where the night exploded, and the only picture in my head was a steel door closing with Gwen behind it.
I crushed it flat. Put it inside the fist around my heart and ordered it to stay put.
She needed a man who kept moving until she was safe.
“Plan A’s dead,” I said over my mic. “Find her.”