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  Cruz broke into a run towards the shelf as two more amorphous pale blobs pulled back behind crates and boxes. As he ran he looked at the floor, seeing a wide gap between the smooth concrete and the bottom shelves. Return fire exploded from the shelves, smashing through wooden boxes and screaming out into the open area with a chattering staccato noise.

  Cruz dropped into a baseball slide, held his weapon tightly to his chest, and flattened himself to whisk under the bottom shelf. One foot lashed out to slam the ankle of a gunmen behind the shelf. The gunman's feet shot back, he pitched forward, and his chin crashed into the metal shelf with a loud bang. Cruz planted his foot to bring himself up into a swift half-kneel and in an instant, his HK was up in his hands, jerking as he fired two more rounds center mass into another gunman. With a spin his weapon whirled in his hands, and he brought the stock hard into the base of the first fallen man's neck where he hunched near the floor. His head snapped, and he finished his forward fall, slumping to the ground.

  "Four hostiles on the north side!" yelled Krieger as she moved forward, curling around the east corner of the metal rack of shelves. Her HK416 was a D10RS model with a 10 inch barrel clutched by a dark cylindrical silencer, which barked loud punches of noise as she drilled 7.62 millimeter rounds towards the first gunman she encountered. Under the sonic boom of the bullets, he stumbled backwards, his fingers clutched at crates on the shelves, and he pulled them over on top of him as he fell.

  "Intruders!" screamed one of the others in a thick accent. He turned towards Mora and lifted his Kalishnikov. His weapon roared with the thunderous rattle of automatic fire.

  "Heads up, Krieg!" shouted Lundquist as he stepped forward with his SCAR CQC chattering under the muffling power of the Interceptor suppressor. The man with the automatic spiraled backwards as his weapon cartwheeled through the air. The last two gunmen came around the west edge of the shelves with their own weapons barking loudly and sending muzzle flashes across the ceiling.

  Chunks of concrete blasted from the floor in a lazy winding path as Lundquist charged forward out of the line of fire. Strickland came up on his left, his own HK416 pressed to his shoulder as he squeezed off a series of three rapid shots, halted, refocused, and fired twice more.

  The last two armed men thrashed and tumbled into heaps with their guns clattering against the hard floor as they fell.

  "Clear!" Strickland shouted.

  "Clear!" answered Cruz, his weapon whipping back and forth behind the southern shelves, verifying no other motion was evident.

  "Cold storage!" Krieger said, already moving towards the thick metal doors at the rear of the building, her weapon trained on them in case anyone should venture out.

  "Don't forget we've got some nasty shit behind that door. Aimed fire, know what you're shooting at!" Strickland came up on Krieger's left, moving to the other side of the door. He looked at Cruz. "Any smart ideas on breaching this one?"

  "Door frame is wood and sheet rock. This one will be easy. No time for any of that fancy camera shit, though, even with these suppressors they know we're here, that's for damn sure."

  "Then what the hell are we waiting for?" Hudson asked, checking a magazine and slamming it home.

  Cruz lifted his weapon, directing the barrel towards the wall where the door met the frame. The door was thick metal, and the latch locked tight around a catch bolted into the wall, creating what looked to be a tight vacuum seal, but wood was still wood.

  He flipped a switch, moving his weapon to full auto and held the trigger, keeping the weapon as still as possible as it hacked rapid fire bullets down at the section of door frame. The wall exploded in a shower of jagged shards mixed with plaster. Within a handful of seconds, the freezer clasp broke free.

  Strickland was moving the second it broke contact. He stepped forward, lifted his knee high, then slammed his heel hard into the door to blast it wide open, knocking wood all over the floor inside. He moved in, lifted his automatic, and sighted in on the scrambling figures inside.

  His first quick count landed on six men, each of them armed, and most of them spreading apart to dash for cover. This was cold storage for sure. The long, narrow room was filled with racks of shelves holding various food products. Towards the rear of the freezer compartment another rack held only a thick wooden box on the center shelf. A stenciled, orange bio-hazard symbol glared back at him from the front of the box.

  Locking its location in his mind, he continued moving left, swiveling to aim even as gunfire rattled back at him. He ducked back around the freezer door, holding it open to use as cover. Bullets punched into it, denting the metal, but did not break through.

  "Confirm! Bio-hazard box is on the far side of the freezer!" Strickland yelled from behind the door amid the rattling cacophony of return fire.

  Cruz thrust himself into the freezer next, dancing bullets across metal shelves, smashing wooden crates to wreckage, and taking out a gunman attempting to hide behind one of the shelves.

  ––––––––

  Krieger followed next, aiming and firing instantly to drop a second man, then firing again to throw a third man into a clumsy backward stumble.

  "Watch that crate!" Strickland shouted as he moved around the door and fired again. The freezer was a narrow corridor of flying lead with bullets hurling from both sides, smashing against the floor and sending boxes and crates spilling from shelves.

  Lundquist clasped his SCAR tightly to his shoulder and swiveled around the edge of the busted door frame just as Krieger dropped to a kneel, hauled on the trigger, and dropped another gunman.

  "Dammit! He's making a run!"

  At the far end of the freezer, one of the men armed with an AK-47 dashed back towards the rear shelf and bracketed himself next to the bio-hazard marked crate.

  "No move!" he shouted. "No shoot! I explode!"

  With those few words the cold storage room drowned in silence, with only the fading echo of gunfire clinging to the frosted corners of the room.

  "Not joke!" the man screamed in his broken English. "Not afraid to die!"

  Strickland's well-trained eyes shifted from corner to corner, then focused on the man at the far end of the cold storage room, assessing everything: his eyes, his demeanor, his posture, and his fist, clamped around a slim black handle. Narrow twists of coiled wire ran over his clenched fingers, up towards the crate, and under a lifted wooden lid.

  "They've got it rigged!" he shouted.

  "Already?" Hudson asked. He continued to sweep the area.

  "Dead man's switch?" asked Cruz.

  "They're smart," Strickland replied, "I don't think they're that smart."

  Once again his gaze shifted to the man's eyes. It only took a second to read the man, and in that second, Strickland decided he wasn't lying.

  "Strick on your right!"

  Everything moved at once. Bang, bang. A gunman missed among the chaos leaped out from behind the shelves to their right. He was a young olive-skinned boy, teenager by the looks of him, with his narrow torso swallowed by an oversized tactical vest. The AK-47 in his grip came up, around, and into his two-hand firing position, all in slow motion.

  Strickland saw it out of the corner of his eye, but he was the only one sighted in on the guy with the bomb, and out of the group, he was the best shot. He couldn't move.

  "Got it!" Hudson shouted as he swung the barrel of his LaRue, tended by the SureFire noise suppressor. The weapon barked twice, jerking in his hand, and seemed to break the sound barrier before the flat crack of bullets echoed in the frigid room.

  The man at the far end flinched just a little. Strickland saw the spasm in his thumb even from thirty yards away. The man who wasn't afraid to die was going to squeeze the trigger. The choice was over. There was no decision to be made.

  As three swift bursts blasted from the barrel of his automatic, the HK416 thrashed in the cold air.

  CHAPTER TWO

  "I still can't believe you took that fucking shot," Hudson said, shaking his h
ead.

  "What choice did I have?" Strickland asked. "He was getting ready to blow that thing."

  "Blow what? The empty crate?"

  Now it was William Strickland's turn to shake his head as he tipped the slender glass to his lips and drank a long swallow of beer. Hey, Hudson was right. The guy was full of shit. They'd removed the nasty gas from the bio-hazard crate and stashed it away in a locked freezer, leaving the crate sitting on the shelf, empty. Apparently when the commotion occurred outside, they grabbed some random crap and made it look like they had fashioned it into a bomb.

  Who is a bigger amateur, the guy who tries to trick highly trained military operatives, or the military operative who falls for it?

  "Did you talk to Brackovik?" Krieger asked, setting down her own empty glass.

  Strickland nodded. "Clean up crew is en route. He was very appreciative."

  "Central Intelligence again?" she asked.

  "Dunno. Don't care," Strickland replied, smirking and flashing her a look. "Money's good no matter which department sends us on these things."

  "Well, yeah, but when the fucking NSA does it, it takes the God damned checks a month to clear."

  Laughs rang around the rim of the table. The bar was small and close to empty, like the ones they normally gravitated towards after a particularly stressful operation. Strickland sat in a rickety wooden chair with a black tank top pulled tight over his broad shoulders. Krieger had decided to look a little less conspicuous and had actually put on blue jeans with her blue t-shirt, an occasion that had elicited some snide comments from her male teammates.

  Hudson and Cruz went the simple route of t-shirts and black cargo pants, while Lundquist wore one of his trendy button-down plaid shirts over khakis. They were just a group of friends out after a hard day's work.

  "So you trying to tell us you weren't scared at all?" Lundquist asked, glancing over his beer glass at Hudson.

  "Nah, man. Seen shit like that a thousand times."

  "Only shit you've seen is the stuff you're full of," Cruz barked back. "If that dude had gotten a chance to punch that trigger, you'd have been wishing you wore your brown pants, motherfucker."

  More laughs in the small, dark room. There were scattered tables around, but they were all empty except for the one where the team sat. A few hunched figures perched on bar stools, but the place was the definition of a 'dive'. Turns out, even here in the Ukraine, you went into those places, especially here at the feet of the Carpathian Mountains. It was not exactly a tourist trap.

  "Too bad Bucky wasn't here," Mora said, then chased her words with a swift slug of liquid.

  "Yeah, he's still not moving real well," Strickland replied. Earle Park had been a mainstay on the team ever since Strickland formed it a few years past. On one of their most recent operations, he'd caught some buckshot in a sensitive area. That had earned him some jokes, and the nickname Bucky, but the truth was, he'd come pretty close to punching his ticket, and Strickland was in no rush to get him back on active duty.

  The table was quiet for a moment, then Hudson held up his glass, half empty. "To Park," he said, nodding.

  "Park," they all repeated, clinking their glasses together. All at once, they tipped them back and drained them, setting the empties down in one loud choreographed bang of glass on wood.

  "You don't talk about that operation much," Cruz commented, looking at Strickland. "It was just the two of you on that one, right?"

  Strick nodded.

  "What was that about?"

  How was he supposed to explain it? What words existed to describe what that mission had been like? A rescue mission for a Romanian scientist... A bizarre underground laboratory... Abandoned animal specimens... And that thing....

  That God forsaken thing had almost killed them and gotten Bucky an ass full of buckshot. Sometimes he remembered that thing, late at night when he couldn't sleep. His back pressed to his sheets, a thin coat of sweat covered his skin, and his heart thrashed. As a Special Forces operator for over a decade, there wasn't much that set Strickland's nerves on edge, but that... that thing outside the Romanian lab, that was fucking horror movie material there.

  But who would he even talk about it to? Part of his hefty pay out was signing a very specific non-disclosure agreement, and you didn't get as far as Strickland got in the world of independent contracting by breaking NDAs and revealing classified intel. He took those words as gospel.

  "Just one of those things," he replied. "You think it's a normal op, but things go sideways."

  "It was near here, too, wasn't it?" Lundquist asked. He raised his hand to grab the waitress' attention, who nodded and wandered over, certainly in no rush to assist.

  Strickland's brow furrowed. "Now that you mention it," he said, his voice trailing off. How had that not occurred to him until now? It was a different country and a different part of this mountain range, but considering all the different places on the planet Strickland had traveled to, it was a remarkably small world.

  A low buzz interrupted his train of thought as a vibration on the top of his wrist thrummed the skin there. He glanced at his watch and noted an incoming call, an incoming call from an area code he recognized.

  "I gotta take this," he replied, pushing away from the table and slipping his secure phone from the pocket of his dark cargo pants.

  "This is Strickland," he whispered, weaving through scattered empty tables and making his way towards the exit door. As he pushed through it, the cold air bit at his bare flesh which was more exposed than usual underneath the tank top clinging to his muscular frame.

  "This line secure?"

  "This is the agency-supplied phone, yeah."

  A low hum of static broken up by a series of muffled clicks signaled an encryption system locking onto the call and beginning scrambling protocols.

  "William Strickland, this is Agent Davies."

  National Security Agency, then. Just fucking wonderful.

  "Hey, Davies," Strickland replied. "Can I help you?"

  "We understand that you've recently completed an operation for the CIA," he said.

  "I'm not at liberty to discuss the status of any operations for any divisions of the United States government, Agent Davies."

  "Of course you're not," Tristan Davies replied. "Regardless, we have a somewhat urgent matter we are requesting your attention on.

  "Urgent matter?"

  "Extremely urgent."

  Strickland lowered his head and closed his eyes. In four hours he would be on a plane, heading back to Vermont to see his family for the first time in a month. He had promised Jenn and the kids that he'd be taking some time off. The last three back-to-back operations had left them a nice little nest egg to allow that to happen.

  "I'm supposed to be home in twenty-four hours," he replied. "I've got commitments, Agent Davies."

  "This could be very lucrative for you and your team ," Davies replied. "You may want to at least run it past them."

  No, he didn't need to run it past them. Out of all of them, he was the only one with family at home, and the only one in a rush to get back stateside. If he dangled this carrot in front of them, there was no doubt he would be the lone detractor who wasn't interested.

  "How lucrative are we talking about? And what's the timeline?"

  "A hundred," Davies replied. "Split five ways, that's twenty apiece."

  Jesus. Twenty K? For one op?

  "What's the catch?" he asked.

  "What's always the catch?" Davies replied. "It's dangerous. Our client is quite insistent that you be involved. Mentioned you by name."

  "I wasn't aware that that NSA took on 'clients'," Strickland replied. "What the hell is going on here?"

  "Let's just say we and our client have mutual interests," Davies said. "And there is an issue at a facility in your neck of the woods."

  "What kind of facility?"

  "Agree to the op, then we can go into details."

  "Jesus Christ, Davies."

  "You s
hould know how this works by now, Strickland."

  Yeah, how this works is that even when you're out, the government still has you by the short hairs, especially when they dangle twenty thousand dollars in front of your eyes.

  "I'll need to talk to my team," Strickland said. "They need some details, Davies. I can't ask them to agree based on my word."

  There was a moment of silence on the other end, followed by a sigh. "Fair enough," Davies replied. "This is another GenTech operation, a research and development station in the Carpathian Mountains, this one in Slovokia."

  "Fuck me," Strickland replied. "What is it about GenTech and the fucking Carpathians?"

  "There are certain natural resources unique to the area," Davies replied.

  In the back of his head, a vision snapped to reveal the strange, hideous creature that he and Earle Park had confronted not so long ago. A shiver ran up his arms.

  "Okay, so what's up with this R & D facility?"

  "It's testing some revolutionary genetic treatments ... or at least it was. Up until two hours ago."

  "What happened two hours ago?" Strickland asked.

  "That's what we need you and your team to find out."

  "What do you mean?"

  "As of two hours ago, the facility went dark. Completely off the grid. No communications, no power, no distress calls, nothing. It's just gone."

  "What's the working theory?"

  "We're afraid that a local terror cell might have discovered what sort of work is going on there. They might think what GenTech is doing can be weaponized."

  Strickland once again thought back to that night on the ridge of the mountains, in that flat valley next to a small town. God damned right that shit could be weaponized.

  "The facility is in Slovokia, about a two hour trip by helicopter. We've got your cover stories and your clearance already set in motion. You'll be home in thirty-six hours."

  Strickland stood alone in the dirt covered parking lot, the cool breeze snapping at his bare arms. Goose flesh still prickled there, but it had nothing to do with the cold. Ever since that operation, the one that got Park his ass full of buckshot, the one that had him wandering through abandoned animal pens, he'd had an uneasy feeling about GenTech. The global conglomerate promised a genetic answer to all of life's problems. Something wasn't sitting right with him when it came to GenTech, and to be honest, that last thing he wanted was to involve himself with them again.