Operation - Dead City Ch. 01

The jet came first.

A sustained note bloomed somewhere above the cloud cover, low and climbing. It was the kind of sound that turned every face beneath it upward and held them there until the sound itself relented. The silver of an airframe flickered through a tear in the overcast and was gone before the eye could finish its work on it.

Then the contrail, long and clean and indifferent, drew a single white stroke across a sky that had not been clean in weeks. Those who lived beneath it had begun to suspect it would not be clean again for the rest of their lives.

The clouds parted and admitted the rain. Once the rain began, it did not stop. It came down in sheets across the slate of the Meridian rooftops. It beat itself flat against the boarded windows of shuttered storefronts. It gathered along the curbs in long brown ribbons that carried with them the leavings of a city already learning, in small and humiliating ways, to be dead.

At the corner of Fourteenth and Elm a body laid in the gutter beneath a blue municipal tarp. The wind would not leave the tarp alone. It lifted the tarp twice, and twice the tarp fell. On the second fall the corner peeled back far enough to expose the hand beneath.

On the third finger of the hand sat the silver of a wedding ring. The silver caught the orange of a streetlight that the city's last electrical engineer had decided, in the small hours of day three, to leave alight. The tarp came down again. The hand returned to its darkness.

There was nobody on the street to see any of it.

Sandbags at the corner. A Humvee parked across the intersection at an angle. Two National Guardsmen stood behind the.50 caliber on its roof, both of them staring into the same middle distance and finding the same nothing there. Plywood boarded every storefront window, three sheets deep where the glass had been ambitious.

Somebody with a can of orange spray-paint had written codes across the plywood that none of the citizens of Harwick had ever been meant to read. A child's bicycle laid on its side in the rain in front of a tax preparation office, the chain off the sprocket, the seat soaked through to the foam.

A row of MISSING posters had been stapled and re-stapled to the chain-link fence around the parking lot of the Korean Baptist church. Six and seven deep in some places. The rain had taken the ink down through the paper into the paper beneath, and then through that into the paper beneath that. What remained was warped pulp. Nobody on the inside of the Wall any longer believed it would be claimed.

A C-130 thundered low over the rooftops. Three hundred feet of altitude and not a foot more. The dull olive of its belly hung close enough that one could read the unit numbers stenciled on the rudder.

The Guardsmen at the.50 did not look up. They had stopped looking up a week ago. They had stopped, more or less, the day they had realized that nothing they saw above their heads any longer had any operational relationship to their own.

A dozen miles south of Fourteenth and Elm, beneath the lee of a green tarp strung between a news van and the steel ribs of a combat engineer's portable shelter, a young woman in a tan tactical jacket stood with a handheld microphone. Water beaded across her dark coiled hair. A press lanyard sat at her throat. It read OKAFOR, T. - INDEPENDENT.

She was twenty-nine years old. Nigerian-American on the side that had given her the bones of her face. Tennessee on the side that had given her the steadiness of her hands.

Cable news had put her on a screen seven times in the past year. Twice in connection with Harwick. They had done so because she was competent, and they had done so because she was a knockout. Both halves of the equation were true, and she had been a journalist long enough now to have stopped pretending she did not know it.

Her cameraman stood at her shoulder. Rain dripped from the lens hood of his camera. His shirt was soaked through the collar to the sternum.

The man she was interviewing was older. A National Guard sergeant named Coltrane. His fatigues were clean despite the rain. His helmet was held under his left arm. Three rows of ribbons climbed the right side of his chest plate, and the rain was already darkening the bottom row.

"Sergeant Coltrane," she said. She raised the microphone to a height that would not crowd him. "How long has Harwick city been closed off to the rest of the world?"

Coltrane glanced up at the sky, as if the answer might be found there rather than in his own head.

"This'll be day twenty-seven."

"And what is actually happening inside the Wall?"

He looked past the camera. The pause was a long one.

"Above my paygrade, ma'am."

She did not press. The professionals never pressed. Not on camera. Not when the answer was so clear. A different kind of silence ran the length of the perimeter.

500 miles of reinforced concrete and razor wire ten feet deep and fifty feet tall. It had been raised in less than a month by every Combat Engineer Battalion the Pentagon could spare to enclose Harwick City. Whatever was inside, they did not want getting out.

Guard towers stood at one-hundred-meter intervals along its inside face. A C-RAM gun system on a flatbed truck at the eastern bend swiveled in slow patient sweeps. It had been listening for weeks. It had been listening for the inbound notes its operators hoped never to hear.

A pair of Apache gunships turned a slow continuous orbit overhead. The navigation lights on their tail booms were visible through the rain. The rotors themselves were lost in it. They looked, from the ground, like two cigarettes drawing themselves out at the ends of arms nobody could see.

From somewhere inside the urban canyon to the east, beyond the shoulder of the Cradle district, a SAM site fired vertical. The missile's contrail climbed through the cloud and vanished. Two seconds later, somewhere far above the rain, an F-22 banked hard

at altitude. Its afterburner brightened.

The radar warning of a foreign tracking system rose and fell in the headset of a pilot the people beneath the cloud could not see. The F-22 dispensed chaff in a glittering bloom and rolled inverted into the cloud. Its silhouette vanished. The sound of its passing faded, swallowed by the endless rain and the watchful silence inside the Wall.

Far from that hidden sky, beneath layers of concrete and fluorescent light, the Vault waited.

The Vault was a converted FEMA facility eighteen miles outside the Wall. Three concrete stories of brutalist architecture buried into the spine of a hillside that had been a state park in another life. It had been painted in the flat industrial grey of a building that did not want to be looked at. From above, even in summer light, the building read as another fold of the hillside. From inside it was even colder.

The operations room ran the same grey as the exterior. Twelve workstations in two arcs. Six screens on the front wall. From left to right they showed the live ISR feeds of the city. Three drone overheads cycling through the eastern quadrants, a signals intelligence visualization that resembled nothing so much as weather, the actual weather, and a master mission timeline that ticked forward in red against a black band along the bottom of the center monitor.

The timeline would not stop ticking until somebody at the table elected to stop it. Fluorescent overheads. The smell of coffee gone cold in a paper cup somebody had set down two hours before and forgotten.

Jax sat at the back of the room. He filled it without trying. Seven feet and two inches of deep mahogany muscle in tactical pants and a fitted black compression long-sleeve. The shirt could not quite contain his arms. Its sleeves rode up so that the dense black-and-grey of his tattoos showed past the cuffs. The old work disappeared under the sleeves at the bicep and emerged again at the neck.

He leaned slightly back in his chair. His face was calm. He was always calm. Even in the most impossible situations. His face did not work any other way. He had stopped trying to force it years ago.

His beard was jet black and tight to the jaw. It was oiled and trimmed at the cheek line with geometric precision. His haircut was a fresh high-and-tight. The line above his ears and forehead was razor sharp.

At the front of the room, framed against the satellite mosaic of Harwick that occupied the wall behind her, stood Vivienne Claude. She was French. She was forty-four. On her best days she looked thirty-one. Her best days were every day.

She stood five feet and nine inches in the low black heeled boots she did not switch out for combat boots. Her hair was the color of old ash, with a quiet silver running through it. The silver was not grey, simply the paler color the French take from their grandmothers.

Her hair fell glass-smooth and silk-pressed to the lower back. Every layer in it lay in the order the layers had been meant to lie in. Half of it was pulled up at the nape into a low sleek chignon, held by two matte black pins. Two soft strands hung at her temples.

Her face was angular and refined. High cheekbones rose over a straight French nose. A long throat sat exposed by the chignon. A sharp and clean jawline. When she tilted her head, the line of it disappeared under the soft press of her ear into her hair, only to emerge again on the other side.

Her mouth was wide and full. She had painted it a matte rose at six in the morning and had not retouched it since. Her eyes were cold grey. A winter color framed by a pair of thin-frammed glasses she didn't actually need.

Her skin was pale. True French pale. The kind that did not tan and did not freckle and did not need base, because the necessary work required to prevent all that was taken. Thirty years of vegetables, restraint, and sleep.

She was elegantly built, lean across the shoulders and along the back. Heavier through the rest of her than the lean shoulders led the eye to expect. Full round hips that rode high. Wool trousers that failed to flatten her shape. A waist drawn in tight against the swell of the hips above and the swell of the thighs below. And a full bust beneath the silk.

A thin gold band sat on her right ring finger. A golden wedding ring.

She held a slim laser pointer in her right hand. Jax watched her from the head of the table. His hands were folded in front, masking the fact he wasn't fully paying attention to just the briefing alone.

His head was angled at the screen. But the angle of his eyes was one full degree off the screen and one full degree onto Vivienne. That single degree had been in place since the moment she clicked to her first slide.

She knew exactly where his eyes were. She did not look back. Yet.

"Domestic terror organisation in of control Harwick," she began. Her voice was clean and dry and unhurried. The kind of voice that had once read intelligence summaries to a President at six in the morning, and would, given the chance, do so again.

"Confirmed since day three. Composition is mixed. Command structure opaque. Recruitment broad. Estimated active fighter count ranges from eight thousand to eighty thousand depending on which intelligence source you consult.

NSA places the figure at thirty thousand on the basis of voice-printing across open communications. CIA at fifty-eight thousand, on the basis of, by their own admission, a compromise between two analytical schools that hate each other. DIA at eighty-six thousand on the basis of weapons signatures across the city and an assumed conscript-to-rifle ratio that the Marines have privately told us is too generous. JTF Command refuses to commit a number on paper.

On that note, we've also obtained reports of hostile civilians. Be they groups or individuals, rioting and looting has grown beyond rampant. Authority forces have relented in their efforts, choosing to safeguard the other side of the spectrum. This number we cannot attribute an answer to. Rules of engagement dictate it is the operator's call."

She clicked. A new slide. Aerial photography of the southern industrial corridor, taken at an oblique angle from twenty thousand feet. The Cradle facility was outlined in red.

"Possible biological weapon in their possession," Vivienne said. "Nature unknown. Vector unknown. Delivery system unknown. The intelligence consensus confirms the weapon exists. The consensus places it most likely at the Cradle facility in the southern industrial corridor. No consensus on what type of weapon this is."

She let the slide hang on the wall behind her.

She clicked again. A redacted federal document filled the screen. Its top line was uncensored: OPERATIONAL MANDATE - FIXED STORM.

She let the click land. Then, at last, she allowed herself the indulgence she had denied herself for the eleven minutes of the briefing thus far. She looked at Jax directly. The look lasted a quarter of a second. She wet her lips and pursed.

She resumed.

"Federal mandate, signed at the level of the deputy national security advisor and finalized over the secure exchange at twenty-two hundred local last night. Jax, your team will insert via Lima-7 under cover of National Guard coordination. You will conduct reconnaissance through the Meridian and Old Harwick districts. You will recover the weapon and return it here undamaged. The gates will not open for you otherwise. You will avoid open engagement with the larger enemy force unless required or ordered otherwise."

She clicked again. Major Wallace Reyes appeared on the side monitor. The still had been pulled from his personnel file. Crew cut. Tired eyes. Three rows of ribbons over a forty-year shadow that had not yet caught up with him at the time of the photograph, and that had caught up with him many times since.

"Your coordination point at Lima-7 is Major Wallace Reyes, National Guard infantry, forty years uniformed. The last fifteen in command. He will let you into the city. He will also refuse any request to exit the city under all circumstances except the one."

Vivienne clicked once more. The slide went to a clean wall projection of pale blue.

"Questions."

Jax remained leaning back in his chair. Almost imperceptibly. "Who decides if the mandate expands?"

"The deputy. With concurrence from the Joint Staff. With concurrence from the President via written finding. The mandate is narrow on purpose. The mandate is reviewable on a forty-eight hour rolling basis."

With that, the questions were over. The room exhaled.

Vivienne set the laser pointer down on the lectern. She walked the length of the briefing table without sound. The line of her hips moved under the fine grey wool. The silk shell caught the overhead lighting along the rise of her ribs.

Every eye at every workstation followed her. There was nothing else in the room worth looking at. She stopped at Jax's chair. Close. Closer than the briefing required. Close enough that the dark florals and the leather of her perfume settled into the air between them and remained.

He did not move. She looked down at him in his chair. He looked up.

The hunger in her eyes was not pretending, for the half-second she allowed it to live, to be anything other than what it was. The hunger in his was the exact mirror of hers. Neither of them blinked.

"The city is, as of tonight, yours, Caption. Be careful."

She said it low. She said it for him. The line landed once at the operational register and once at the register that lay beneath it. He read both.

Jax stood. He was a head and a half taller than her even before he straightened. When he straightened, the difference grew. He looked down at her now. Her chin lifted. Her mouth remained still.

"Copy."

Vivienne turned. She crossed the operations room toward the side door on the western wall. The door led only up a short flight of unmarked stairs to her office on the second floor and to nothing else.

The operations room watched her go. Jax followed. He went through the side door and up the stairs without comment. The side door swung quietly shut behind him.

The medical bay smelled of disinfectant and of the warm copper of IV warmer fluid. Stainless steel everywhere. White light from the recessed fixtures overhead. They had been engineered to be brighter than necessary, because the doctor had insisted on the over-engineering and the engineers had relented.

Two surgical bays separated by a half-curtain. Three exam rooms. A closed double door at the back labelled, in black vinyl on a polished steel panel, SURGICAL THEATER. Beneath the label, in smaller vinyl, the words PROP THIS DOOR OPEN AND YOU WILL ANSWER TO ME - H. WILLIAMS.

Doctor Hana Williams stood at the central counter. She was working her way down a load-out manifest, ticking entries against the open pelican cases stacked at her left.

She was Korean-American, forty-seven years old. She did not look forty-seven. What she looked instead was not the figure she would have given you if you had asked her, which was twenty-eight. She had been telling people she looked twenty-eight for nineteen years now. The joke had ceased to be a joke some time ago and had become merely a thing she said. The thing she said had ceased even to be inaccurate. Although she would never have acknowledged the latter aloud.

She was five feet and six inches tall. Her hips were wide. Her thighs filled the black tactical pants she had been issued and that she had hemmed herself. The white coat over her shoulders was unbuttoned to the sternum. Beneath the coat she wore a fitted black mock-neck that strained against her ample breasts.

Long, jet-black hair, silk-pressed to a glass finish that did not move when she did. Drawn up at the crown of her head into a high clinical bun set so precisely that a measuring tape laid against its arc would have failed to find a single millimetre out of place. Not a strand loose at the temples. Not a strand loose at the nape.

She did not look up when Jax walked in.

"Field surgical kits are packed," she said. The pen moved without pause across the page. "Twelve of them. Gunshot trauma loadout per kit. Units of O-negative in the cold-chain cases. TXA pre-loaded in the auto-injectors. You have the personal kit with expanded suture selection."

He stopped at the counter across from her. He rested his hands on the steel edge. The size of his hands at rest on the counter took up more of it than they had any right to.

"Add burn treatment to every kit. Deep lacerations too. Double the TXA."

She looked up. The pen stopped on the manifest. She let the request settle. "Vivienne briefed me to only expect heavy gunshot wounds."

Jax leaned close. "I'm telling you what to actually prepare for."

"How sure are you?"

"Sure enough to tell you how to do your job."

Dr. Hana mulled the reply in her head. Then Jax reached into his pocket. He produced a small unmarked USB drive and set it on the counter between them.

"Something else for you. Copy it to a second drive and put it in my kit."

"What's this?"

"Treatment protocols. Aerosolized pathogen exposure. They're not in any military or civilian medical database. Do not share this with anyone. No one must know about this drive."

A sense of curiosity twisted Dr. Hana's eyebrows. She looked up at him with suspicion. For a moment she meant to ask why this was in his possession. But after nine long years of standing on the other side of a counter from him, she knew better.

"How do I read it without putting it on the network?"

"The airgapped terminal in the surgical theater."

"Understood," she said slowly. "Anything else?"

"Once we're through Lima-7, the gate closes behind us. It doesn't open again until the mission is done. Could be weeks. Could be longer."

She capped her pen. She looked up at him with a defiant gaze. As if she knew he was expecting something. She was willing to give it to him, but not so easily. Never so easily.