Chapter Ten
Topsail Beach, North Carolina
Within the United States Army, there is a separate and autonomous military force that investigates serious crimes committed by active-duty service members. The special agents of the Criminal Investigation Command, or CID, are led by the Commanding General, who reports to the Chief of Staff of the Army and to the Secretary of the Army.
At 0315 on an early summer morning, with the crack of dawn still hours distant, CID Task Force Benedict Bravo was embarked on a top-secret mission code-named Quisling. The six special agents in attendance were prepared to drop the net.
The trail had led them, after fits and starts, to Topsail Beach, the southernmost town on Topsail Island, with a year-round population of 383. The team was focused on a summer rental home, a split-level with four bedrooms and a finished basement prone to flooding during hurricanes. The special agents watched the second hands on their jet-black Smith & Wesson military watches, synchronized before assembly at the strike point where, they hoped, the mission would be finished with no one outside the CID any the wiser.
The mission agents were dressed identically in midnight black: knit watch caps, balaclavas covering their faces, modular tactical vests, and rip-stop trousers bloused into their combat boots. Each member of the team wore a Beretta M-9 pistol chambered in 9 mm Parabellum rounds, with fifteen rounds in a detachable box magazine and one live in the chamber, with the pistol’s safety off. Besides sidearms, each carried sundry pyrotechnics, mostly M-84 flash-bang stun grenades, and various long guns approved for service with the CID: selective-fire M-4 carbines chambered for 5.56 mm NATO rounds—one with an M-203 under-barrel grenade launcher—and Mossberg 590 12-gauge pump shotguns with a 20-inch barrel and extended combat magazines, loading double 0 buck and 1-ounce rifled slugs.
Any heavier munitions would be locked inside the team’s civilian-style Humvee, painted matte-black and parked a block downrange from their intended target on this early morning without moon or stars.
Benedict Bravo’s commanding officer was Captain Sedgewick Larkin, a sixteen-year veteran, fitted like his other special agents with a set of ATN PVS-7 standard military-issue night-vision goggles and a Bluetooth communication device that permitted conversation at whisper level with the other members of his team. He understood what was at stake and had impressed it on his men: Lieutenant Gregory DuBois, Staff Sergeant Richard Malvern, Staff Sergeant Leo Edwards, Sergeant Edgar Rankin, and Corporal Payton Luce.
They were the best he had available.
Larkin could only hope they were good enough.
Another quick glance at his watch showed the time as 0329. “Sound off,” he ordered, and stood waiting while five voices in descending order of rank confirmed that each was standing by, ready to move.
That used the better part of half a minute, whereupon Larkin told his strike team, “Do it now!”
* * *
Staff Sergeant Edwards had the long split-level’s back door covered, facing South Shore Drive and the Atlantic Ocean, surging dark and vast beyond. His Mossberg 590 weighed close to ten pounds, fully loaded, fitted with ghost ring sights and a bayonet lug for close-quarters combat, though Edwards had passed on mounting the steel, opting instead for Shock Lock breaching rounds to take the door down.
After the order to advance, he crossed the fifteen yards of grass and pavement in a rush. Angling his Mossberg’s muzzle toward the door lock, a round already chambered and the safety disengaged, Edwards triggered the first shot, then was blinded as the green field of his NVGs suddenly flushed brilliant white.
The door exploded, some kind of propellant charge behind it, striking Edwards with sufficient force to rip the shotgun from his grasp, slamming him over backward in a daze, blood gushing from his broken nose to soak the woolen balaclava. Groping for his M-9, he had nearly reached it when the hazy figure of a man approached, stood over him and aimed a sound-suppressed assault rifle at the staff sergeant’s face.
“Night, night,” the stranger said. “You lose.”
* * *
Lieutenant Gregory DuBois heard the explosion, knew their setup on the split-level had gone to shit, and went ahead regardless. He still had work to do—they all did—and until the captain called them off, he would proceed as planned.
His target was a set of sliding-glass doors that granted access to the layout’s finished basement on the north end of the house. The lieutenant rushed it, triggering a 3-round out of his M-4 carbine, braced for anything he could think of since the first explosive detonation on the premises. So far, he didn’t know if it had been a booby trap of some kind, planted when their targets flew the coop, or if the men they’d come to take down still remained inside.
In either case, until he had eyes on the enemy or empty rooms, he had to play his hand the same. Assume there was trouble of the life-or-death variety lying in store for him and the other members of his team, fight through it and, for God’s sake, come out on the other end alive.
His tumbling rounds opened the broad glass doors, their tinted panes shattering and cascading like broken sheets of ice. DuBois was ten feet out and closing when he spotted muzzle-flashes well back in the basement recreation room and felt the high-velocity projectiles rip into him below his Mod Tac vest, snapping his femurs, shattering his pelvis. Stunning pain engulfed his legs as he toppled forward, sprawling facedown on the manicured grass.
Somehow he kept his grip on the M-4 and tried to spot the opposition with his carbine’s Burris Optics 5×36 mm AR-536 Red Dot Sight, but they had him zeroed first. A final muzzle-flash flared in front of him, driving a bullet into the lieutenant’s forehead, and his world went blank.
* * *
Staff Sergeant Malvern and Sergeant Rankin rushed the southeast corner of the split-level rental together, targeting a door that should grant access to the kitchen if the floor plans they’d obtained from Pender County’s clerk in Burgaw were entirely up to date and accurate.
Rankin had loaded deer slugs in his Mossberg, never mind nonlethal breaching rounds, and Malvern had an M-651 grenade in the M-203 launcher slung beneath his carbine’s barrel. The gren contained fifty-three
