Riding Behind Magnum

Chapter 1

Storm

Magnum didn’t look like himself, and it bugged me. None of them looked right, actually.

The teams going in had been shaved and depilated from head to toe. An artist had drawn tattoos on some of them, and they’d all been coated with a chemical wash to keep them from shedding skin cells.

There was nothing lowkey about these disguises. Several had prosthetics to make their nose look different. Magnum’s lips were wrong, and he was wearing eyeliner that made his eyes look like they were a different shape.

But that was just the beginning. The man leaning down to kiss me at two forty-three in the morning had a shaved skull, a heavy brow that wasn’t his, a jaw that wasn’t his, skin three shades darker than his own, and a spiderweb inked across the back of one hand.

No eyebrows. No eyelashes. Every visible inch of him wrong.

He put a gloved hand to the back of my neck and tilted my face up. The gloves were wrong too — some textured synthetic that wouldn’t print.

“Who am I?”

The question landed like a fist, but it also helped center me. My throat closed, but I answered out of instinct.

“Magnum.”

“Damned right.” His thumb moved across the lips he’d just kissed. “Do your job. I’ll do mine.”

Then he was gone, and I was left in the control center with the four men I’d been practicing with for a week and a half.

Three of us were responsible for a team, while McGyver would watch everything.

And yes, this meant our people were divided into three teams.

Delta Team was handled by Gears, and their primary job was to deal with security and to watch everyone’s back. Eventually, they would help with guests if necessary, unless the team handling the fighters needed more bodies.

Bravo Team was handling the fighters, and their overwatch person was Skippy. Their primary job was to get them out. Magnum was on this team, along with anyone else with even a tiny bit of medical knowledge. Also, the bikers most suited to helping brainwashed prisoners were in Bravo.

I was primary overwatch for Charlie Team, which would start out handling security but would move to handling guests once they started coming out of their suites and cabins.

I had the feeds for both Charlie Team and Delta Team, but Bravo’s feeds weren’t available to me unless McGyver decided to change that, which meant I had no idea what was going on with Magnum.

And apparently, that was by design. Gears wasn’t on Bravo Team for the same reason — you focus on the job at hand, not a specific person.

The RV smelled like coffee, and the four of us sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the converted front cabin. We each had our jobs, and McGyver would be the one deciding when and if those changed.

Out in the field, Ember was leading Charlie Team, and I was happy to have her helmet cam as my primary feed, though I could see everyone’s in smaller windows on my huge monitor.

Ember was Charlie One, Squatch was Charlie Two.

Everyone had a number. No names. We’d been practicing this long enough, it was second nature, but it’d been odd, at first.

We were parked on a logging road southwest of the property, backed into a cut in the trees, covered with a huge camo mesh cloth.

We had a few minutes before the men made it to their stations, and I took a deep breath and slowly blew it out.

Skippy patted my arm without looking at me, and I patted his back, as if I was calming him, too. He chuckled, but no one talked.

And then I heard Sloan in my headphones saying, “We’re go.”

McGyver’s calm voice said, “Power and cell cut in three… two… one.”

The feeds went dark for half a second, then the night-vision overlays kicked in, and Sloan was saying, “Go go go go go go go!” and then all hell broke loose.

Everything happened at once, but we’d practiced this, so I focused on Charlie One and kept everything else in the periphery. I had eleven helmet cams available to me; six I was responsible for at this point in the op, and their job at the moment was all security on the north side of the building.

Outside security was brought down fast, explosions happened, doors came off the building, and our people flowed into it.

“Bravo One, stairwell right,” Skippy said into his mic. It’d taken forever to figure out who’d built this complex and then hack into their network, but we’d finally managed blueprints, and everyone in the trailer had them at our fingertips.

“Heat at two o’clock Charlie Four, thirty yards,” I warned.

“Roger that,” he said, and then Crush was moving so fast, the walls around him blurred. He took the other guy out before he knew what happened. For a big guy, Crush can move.

I leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes locked on Ember’s cam, back in the lead.

I switched to Crush’s cam, so I could watch Ember move, because she walked low and silent.

Inhuman. She held her suppressed rifle like it was part of her, and she didn’t walk so much as glide.

I glanced at the other team’s cam and saw Logan working on a door with a portable plasma torch.

The metal door glowed, the torch hissed quietly, and the door swung open. I focused back on Charlie.

I watched Squatch take a security guy down, put him in a hogtie with zip-ties, and then add duct tape. The goal was to keep from killing them, if possible. The bikers wanted them dead, but this was going to go public in a big damned way, and the less people dead, the better.

Ninety seconds after we went in, I heard Skippy say, “Fuck. Deal with the guests first, and make damned sure they don’t flip it, so a guest pretends to be a fighter.”

Skippy had headphones on, so I couldn’t hear what was happening in his feeds. I focused on my people, giving them a heads-up when there were problems, watching the infrared cams our guys had positioned around the guest buildings, and keeping an eye on everything else I was responsible for.

“Shit,” McGyver said, and my screen changed to a row of Lucite rooms with a single person in most, two people in a couple.

There were at least a dozen rooms on either side of a hallway, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that’s how they were housing the fighters.

It’d be like living in a damned fishbowl.

But the cam I was looking through had Magnum holding one man in a choke hold and Dementor holding another. “Which is prisoner and which is guest?” McGyver asked.

“Magnum’s guy is Josh McDaniel, taken in Chicago. Dementor’s guy is Robert Miller, lobbyist for big pharma.” Josh was naked and cuffed with his arms behind his back. Robert’s pants were down, and he was sporting a huge hard-on.

My screen changed to another of the Lucite rooms, and I gave them the name of the prisoner, but I didn’t know the guest, who was also pants-less, though without an erection. Fuck, had these men paid to sleep with the fighters? And wasn’t it obvious that the cuffed men were the prisoners?

Before I could ask questions, I was back on Ember’s cam. I did a fast scan of the area and told her, “Movement inside cabin eleven.” More red caught my eye, and I said, “First though, got a heat signature moving in the back of the kitchen area, in the dining hall.”

For hunt weekends, the place was kind of set up like an African safari, so the huge dining hall resembled a great big tent, even though it was permanent.

The building was without all the extra fabric now, and the view from the thermographic camera on the drone flying over the site told me someone was moving around in the kitchen.

Guests weren’t supposed to have guns on the premises, but every employee except the maids did, even wait staff and cooks.

“Roger that,” Ember said. “Heading to the kitchen.”

I told her exactly what I was seeing and suggested which doors to use.

Her team split up and rushed in from the outside and from the dining room.

I heard gunshots, saw a barrel pointed right at Logan and flashing, but he kept moving.

Didn’t slow even a tiny bit before he took the bastard down with his bare hands.

I know I saw blood through Ember’s cams, but no one mentioned anyone being shot. There was no way Logan was okay, but he was still talking.

I watched them hogtie and duct tape the man who’d shot at them and then move out like nothing had happened.

“Heading to cabin eleven,” Charlie Two said.

And then McGyver’s voice was back, “We need you in two places at once. Someone else will monitor the infrared for Charlie Team. I’m gonna feed you images of people we need ID for.”

“Roger that,” I said, because they’d worked and worked with me to get me to stop saying, “Okay.”

I’m good at compartmentalizing, but it was still hard to see people I’d been looking for right there, wearing shock collars and leather cuffs on their wrists and ankles, lean and muscled — most with haunted looks in their eyes.

I stayed focused on the job at hand and identified nearly everyone they showed me.

And I could see the looks in their eyes when one of our guys called them by name. “Billy Long, it’s going to be okay. We’re here to get you out.” And the eyes went from hostile and wary to disbelieving and hopeful.

But one of the prisoners was fighting them.

A woman, and they only had men downstairs.

“Her name is Annie. Tell her that her brother and twin sister put flyers up looking for her, and they are still annoying the shit out of the detective assigned to her case. Tell her that her family is looking for her.”

Magnum’s calm voice talked to her until she listened to him, and only then could he release the hold he’d had on her, trying to keep her from beating the shit out of him. She’d been chained to the bed, but her arms had been free.

The shock collars were a problem, and the prisoners were clear the damned things had to come off before they could leave the area, lest they get a shock powerful enough to knock them out or possibly straight-up kill them.