slide would provide enough for identification, but just to be certain, he stripped the bullets from the magazine.
People might think of putting on gloves for firearm handling, but few professionals were paranoid enough to wear gloves while feeding ammunition into their appropriate magazines on a clandestine operation.
Hawkins turned away from his fingerprint-gathering project and produced the PDA and thumb drives that he’d discovered. “Is she all right?” Hawkins asked.
Manning nodded. “She’s been having a good cry over her friend. She was a teacher at the same school. They were once very close.”
Hawkins raised an eyebrow. “Roommates?”
Manning nodded. “And quite a bit more.”
Hawkins sighed. “And I threw her on top of a woman she loved...killed like that...”
“The other option was to let her get shot in the back,” Manning offered. He took the thumb drives and looked over the PDA. “I have a wire for this device on the sat case.”
“All the better,” Hawkins replied. “The more we know, the more we can get to taking down the fucker who killed Veronica.”
Manning glanced at him. “We never knew her.”
“She was working for our side,” Hawkins replied.
Manning nodded, then rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t let it get too personal.”
Hawkins frowned. “I’ll keep my head. But that doesn’t mean I won’t take satisfaction in taking theirs...”
The Canadian Phoenix vet left the younger man to his task. Manning had faced his losses over the years and had made enough missions personal. Every member of the team had. And sometimes, that personal investment was enough to take an impossible battle and push them over the top to victory.
But in the end, it still never quieted the ghosts they vowed to avenge.
Blancanales shadowed Schwarz and Lyons as they drove away from the clubhouse, giving his friends a head start just in case the paranoid Heathens club members sent someone to trail them. He’d waited and, through use of the rear-mounted camera, made certain he was not being followed.
The last thing they needed was to be ambushed as they reassembled and prepared for a hard entrance.
Blancanales had been tuned in to his friends as they’d made their infiltration of the clubhouse; he’d heard everything, thanks to built-in, Schwarz-designed zero-profile microphones and the surveillance equipment intrinsic in the Able van. His teammates wouldn’t have been able to hear him, but there was not an interaction that didn’t resound loud and clear in Blancanales’s ears.
Had things gone wrong, he was on sniper overwatch, ready to provide cover for his partners. Now, he was providing further support for his brothers in arms as they fell back to begin their assault.
When Blancanales opened the rear doors of the van, Schwarz was already tearing off the latex of his false tattoos from his neck and shoulder, crumpling the mass up in one fist. He whipped them into a small waste basket with a grimace.
“Bad mood?” Blancanales asked.
“Having to sound like one of those homophobic assholes?” Schwarz growled. “I feel like puking my guts out.”
“They’ve got the shooters locked down in their headquarters,” Lyons said. “They kept too calm a profile. Even when Gadgets made a move against one of their own, and not a prospect, Rucks had full rockers and patches.”
“The prospects outside were edgy and stayed close to more than a couple of trash barrels out front,” Blancanales returned. “Those were the right height for stowing some ARs, especially if they were clean on the bottom.”
“Lid in place, yeah,” Schwarz noted. He went to one of the banks and opened the digital surveillance files. He maximized the thermal imaging camera and made a quick count. Thirty prospects were outside the clubhouse, surrounding it. Inside, it was a little more difficult to see true heat signatures through the walls. Even so, he got general numbers and groups off the colored blobs.
“What odds are we looking at?” Lyons asked, looking over Schwarz’s shoulder.
“The place, from your and my observations, should only have about twenty guys inside. But there are major concentrations of heat sources in the basement and on the third floor,” Schwarz said.
“They split the shooters into two groups?” Lyons inquired.
“Or they have much more than a safe house set up in the clubhouse,” Schwarz said. “The top floors can either be a grow house—in which case, it’s highly unlikely that any shooters are going to be kept on the premises—or a server farm.”
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