Chapter Seven: We Were Mercs Once…and Stupid
Mercenary Wing Rv6-4 “Zero Dogs”
The Zero Dog Compound
Outdoor Training Grounds
1032 Hours PST April 13th
The Zero Dogs trained in rain, sleet, snow and wind, but not without a dump-truck load of bitching and moaning. In Portland, we had rain. Lots of rain. Today was no different.
I yawned, trying to turn away and hide it behind my hand. The morning rain had died off to a spitting mist, the kind that kept you damp but didn’t have the balls to soak you through. Rain. God, I hated it, especially how it blanketed the world in gray. Good thing I lived in the Pacific Northwest—Portland saw forty inches of rain a year, but it was a very misty, gray and depressing rain. The rain equivalent of watching art-house films after losing a job and having a well-loved goldfish die.
Captain Sanders stood next to me, scanning the three multilevel buildings at the corner of the training grounds through high-powered binoculars. The buildings were large but shoddy, mostly just framework with the Tyvek house wrap still visible, designed to simulate urban close-combat assault without costing a lot of money. The building on the far right had a scattering of bullet holes riddling its side and scorch marks from a fire started by a certain person who would remain anonymous.
Mai and her horde of summoned attack pets were Red Team for this assault. She’d summoned squirrels this time—or what resembled squirrels, anyway, despite their vampire fangs, wicked claws, jet-black fur and eyes the color of copper pennies. The sound of squeaks and chittering drifted across the no man’s land that separated us from the buildings. Mai was the main target for this exercise, playing the role of the necromancer, and her Death Pet squirrels were designated as zombie targets, despite being fuzzy, chattering and very small.
Hey, we worked with what we had here.
The heroic Blue Team had the role of assault force, led by Jake and our unflappable hero, Captain Andrea Walker, currently referring to herself in the third person, whose dark hair had frizzed something awful in the damp air. Thank God for helmets. We’d paused behind an embankment a hundred or so meters south of the obstacle course to recon the objective. This exercise revolved around meshing our operating style with Jake’s information on the target’s capabilities, working out kinks, and smoothing over rough patches in the command structure. Oh, and keep a snowball from melting in Hell’s hot fires. Nothing too challenging for our third day of training.
“One hostile visible,” Jake said. “Building two, second-floor stairs.”
He handed me the binoculars and I looked for myself. The black squirrel sat on the top railing, grasping its crimson tail in two tiny paws as its head rotated from side to side, scanning for us. I searched the rest of the building roofs and windows for other lookouts but saw nothing.
“I could send Tiffany in,” I said. “She could charm that little bastard, bring him to us. I mount a tiny camera on him. Use him to scout the inside and feed us live images.”
Jake shook his head. “Not enough time, and he’ll be missed. Besides, your succubus won’t be able to charm zombies.”
Damn. In my haste to sound strategic, I’d forgotten that Mai’s pets represented the necromancer’s zombie army with both its plusses and minuses. And that idea had been damn good too.
Gavin leaned back against the Bradley and laughed. “Yeah, not much for a succubus to work on when it comes to zombies. Not a lot of lift in the old piston once you lose blood pressure. Probably why you don’t see a lot of zombie porn on the interwebz.”
No. I was
not
going to acknowledge that statement. In fact, he was lucky I didn’t have his tongue ripped out with red-hot pincers.
“Tiffany, come here,” I said into the comlink. Tiffany hurried over, keeping low and moving with quiet steps, her wings folded behind her back. She leaned in close and stared at me with her wide, slit-pupil eyes. She had full gear on, but both Gavin and Jake’s heads swiveled and their gazes locked on her. The wash of her sex aura swept across me. The effect was muted somewhat on females who weren’t of the lesbian persuasion, but still, it remained a little suffocating. “Whoa, tone it down a notch, ’kay?”
Tiffany blushed and gave me an apologetic smile. I felt the strength of her aura lessen enough so that she wasn’t pulling in the gaze of every male organism in a hundred-foot radius.
“All right.” I set my hand on her shoulder. “I want you to use cover to sweep around to the west. Keep low, out of sight. I need you to recon the west and north approaches. If we have a better assault line, I want to use it.”
“Affirmative, Captain.” She turned and ran off, long legs pumping. After a dozen steps she unfolded her wings and soared along just above the ground, the tips of her wings kissing the dirt when she flapped them. She wove in and out of the strand of trees fronting a rise in the ground level.
I glanced at Jake, trying to be nonchalant about it. He’d resumed scanning the target, although I noticed a muscle twitching in his jaw. Point for him. Most men couldn’t help but stare at her ass as she retreated. Although…he’d better not be gay. I bit down on my tongue and silently cursed myself. So what if he was gay? Nothing wrong with that. Why would I care? And what the fuck was I doing thinking about it during a training op?
I resolved to ask Sarge about him later, in secret.
“I say we use a pincer movement,” I told Jake. “You lead a strike with the Bradley. Get everybody’s attention on it while I circle around their flank with a secondary assault team. Back door them. Make it really uncomfortable.”
He shook his head. “It’ll diminish our firepower. Up against a real zombie wave, that could be a problem.”
“You’re kidding right? Since when could a zombie chew through a Bradley?”
A tight smile curled on his lips. “You might be surprised what a couple hundred zombies can do. Especially prodded on by a determined necromancer.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll be shooting at them and not sitting still, yeah? I assume you can manage to keep their attention. We’ll cut into them from the west, set up a crossfire and slice them to pieces.”
“Captain,” Hanzo interrupted. He wore his ninja blacks, a hood with his lower face covered by cloth, a katana slung on his back, and bright red medic crosses on his chest and shoulders. “As a follower of the Way of Stealth, my skills would allow me to infiltrate the target area and execute a decapitation strike at our mortal enemy, ensuring total victory. Without a head, the chicken flails.”
“No.”
“But—”
“You’re the medic. Now get your healer-ass back in the Bradley and work the guns.”
Hanzo hesitated, and I could see how hard he struggled not to argue. At last he bowed and went slinking off, head down. God, I hated it when men pouted. Jake watched me with a cocked eyebrow and his quirk of a smile. I knew what he was thinking. I could hear it in my mind as clearly as if he were a telepath.
I cut him off with a gesture before he could get the words out. “Yeah I know. Medic on the weapon systems. But we’re multitaskers with overlapping roles.” Also, I was short-handed in the extreme. Not something I wanted to admit, especially to him, though only a card-carrying imbecile wouldn’t have noticed it already.
His smirk wouldn’t die. “You’re a hard-ass, Captain Walker. What about his ninja role?”
Annoyed, I reached up and turned off the hot mike. “Let’s put it this way, Captain Sanders. I have more ninja skills in one heel of my Jimmy Choos than Hanzo has in his entire repertoire—no matter how many times he watches
Ninja Brothers of Blood
.”
“What the hell is a Jimmy Choo?”
“A fancy shoe. Never mind.”
He glanced down at my combat boots. “To be honest, I can’t see you wearing them.”
My ire flared like a supernova. What the hell did that mean? Some kind of I
can’t be feminine and wear combat boots
backhanded insult? I had half a mind to show the bastard how I made expensive shoes look good, and not the other way around…except that I’d sold them three months ago to help pay for an order of incendiary shotgun ammo.
“Forget about the damn shoes,” I snapped. And he’d had the balls to bitch about
his
briefing getting derailed? “Point is, Hanzo’s a top-grade healer. Under no circumstances are his deluded fantasies to be encouraged. It’s bad enough the Hellfrost Group has no uniform code for medics except for that damn red cross.”
He raised his hands in a placating gesture, amusement still on his face. “A hot-button issue.”
“
All
my issues are hot-button issues. So let’s just focus on the mission.”
Tiffany’s voice crackled over the com. “No visual contact on approach.” Succubus eyes were like hawk eyes, they could focus in with perfect clarity on distant targets, making her a scout par excellence. “No lookouts on the west or north sides. No sign of hostiles, over.”
“Roger that.” I turned and smiled at Jake—and yeah, I’d taken to thinking of him as Jake in my head with disturbing regularity, despite my vows to never do so. “We try my plan.” I keyed on the mike again, issued the relevant commands and received a flurry of affirmatives. The Bradley rumbled when Gavin started it up.
Jake stood with his hands on his hips and jerked his chin toward the Bradley. “So it looks like I get the commander’s seat this time.”
God, the man delighted in provoking me.
“Don’t get used to it.” I motioned Rafe and Sarge over to me. They came in from their picket positions covering our flanks. “Let’s move out.” We’d meet up with Tiffany prior to entry and go in hot.
I started off, crouched to keep low to the ground. I glanced back, because I’ve always believed Lot’s wife got screwed for her curiosity, and I could’ve sworn Jake stared at my ass as I moved away from him. He glanced away at once, but I’d have played Vegas odds I was right. Well, well, well. Wasn’t
that
interesting?
It took less than three minutes, using cover, to flank the target buildings. We hurried along the tree stand, past an unused bunker, and swung around to the west, where we’d meet up with Tiffany. The ground was wet but firm, since it hadn’t rained hard enough to make good mud. We took cover behind the rusting frame of a ’68 Cutlass station wagon and a pile of broken cinderblocks. I checked the target again with binoculars. Since the outbuildings were arranged in a line west to east, only one outside wall faced us now. It had two windows, both without glass, and through them I could see the framework of the interior walls swallowed in gloom, drowned in the shadows of a gray rainy day. No guards stood anywhere in view.
“Better shift, Rafe,” I said. I keyed the mike as Rafe yanked off his cammies with disquieting enthusiasm. Clearly the man had missed his calling as a male stripper. He shifted into werewolf form and picked up his paintball gun again. I decided not to tell him how stupid he looked as a huge werewolf clutching the tiny paintball gun in his clawed hands because I couldn’t exactly have him eating Mai’s pets during a training mission. “Check your weapons.”
We looked over the paintball guns, ensuring a ball sat in the chamber. We used paintball instead of laser combat simulation systems because…well, because it was cheaper. I knew a guy at the paintball place, and he hooked me up with some great deals. Normally paintballs were for shooting people, who were idiots, and not animals, but we made exceptions for the unnerving creatures Mai summoned.
“Blue Team Two stand by,” I said over the radio. “Blue Team One ready?” I looked at them and got nods all around. “Go. Go.
Go
!”
I stood and ran toward the house, paintball gun up and sweeping left to right as the rest of the team followed on my heels. We made it to the building and spread out along the wall, keeping watch on our sectors of fire. I crept to the corner and used a small mirror mounted on a rod to peer around the edge and check for hostiles. Nothing.
“Blue Team One in place,” I confirmed over the mike. “Blue Team Two, begin your assault.”
The Bradley’s engine roared and grew louder as it came around the embankment, speeding toward the buildings, but from this angle I could only hear it, not see it. The air filled with chittering as the Death squirrels rallied. I checked around the corner again with the mirror. This time I caught sight of a lone black squirrel running in circles at the bottom of a doorway.
“Engaging,” Jake said over the com. “Check your targets.” I heard the understated
thup
thup thup
of paintball guns followed by enraged squeaking.
I used hand signals to alert my team we were going in. The single Death squirrel guarding the back never had a chance. I swung out and capped him with a bright blue blob of paint. He tumbled over, his tail flopping. Then he rolled back to his feet and favored me with an evil copper eye. Still, he was technically dead and out of the engagement.
We stacked against the wall and prepared for a dynamic entry into the building. Sarge covered me as I gathered energy for my spell. The energy coursed through me, humming in my bones, warming my body as if a sphere of fire floated in my chest. I signaled, and Rafe kicked in the door and dodged to the side, pressing his back against the outside wall.