Kyle smiled briefly at the easy way Matthew obeyed her order. His old team captain was an honorable man, a good soldier, and an officer he’d been proud to serve under. Despite Matthew’s rank, he wasn’t a metahuman, and Strike Force had ceded command of the mission to the MDF. Unlike some officers Kyle had previously worked with, Matthew hadn’t argued about taking orders from an NCO, and neither had anyone else on his team. If they had, they wouldn’t have been cleared to take part in the mission.
The easiness between Alpha Team and these particular Strike Force operatives stemmed from the years Kyle and his older adoptive brother, Staff Sergeant Alexei Dvorkin, had served with them in that military branch. It helped as well that Matthew and Katie had been dating since last summer. They’d met when Strike Force had aided several MDF field teams in the raid on the Splice lab Vitae Neurotherapeutics had been running in Montana. From what Kyle could tell, their relationship had turned serious in a short amount of time, despite the hectic natures of their jobs. He was happy for them, and he knew Jamie was too.
Kyle pushed his thoughts about Jamie to the back of his mind, not wanting to get distracted. While Katie had telepathically cleared the area, that was no guarantee the Sons of Adam hadn’t left behind any surprises. He couldn’t afford to be anything but on top of his game.
Focusing on the job at hand, Kyle took note of his immediate area, looking for anything out of place. Multiple tire tracks crisscrossed the dirt-covered area, the depth and tread pointing to semi-trucks. Considering the illegal merchandise they were probably moving, Kyle bet the vehicles weren’t driverless like the majority of long-haul trucks on the nation’s highways.
In one spot, the clear impressions of a helo’s landing gear could be made out, the desert wind having yet to wipe them away. Kyle knelt down and studied the divots in the dirt that covered the broken cement.
“They were here as recently as yesterday,” Kyle said over the comms.
“Y’all, I think they were movin’ weapons. Lots of them,” Annabelle Brown replied in her drawling voice. “Someone missed a transport crate. Looks like they didn’t empty it or couldn’t move it because of load weight. Got a goddamn M42 Brownin’ in here.”
“Wonderful,” Katie said flatly.
“Gettin’ pictures and uploadin’ to base. If the Sons of Adam are movin’ heavy weaponry, that ain’t good.”
“Weapons of war in the hands of a domestic terrorist group never is,” Matthew grimly agreed.
Kyle half-listened to the chatter on the comms as he straightened up. He and his temporary partners finished clearing the loading dock area. When they rounded the next corner, they met up with the small group Donovan Williams had been paired with. Alpha Team’s transportation specialist was a tall, built, African-American man who’d served with Jamie, Katie, Madison, and the team’s medic, Trevor Sanchez, in the Recon Marines. When a mission went wrong years ago, the five of them had been turned into metahumans after a horrific Splice attack in the field.
Annabelle, the team’s pilot, had come to them through the Night Stalkers, an aerial special operations group. Their newest member, Agent Sean Delaney, had been on secondment to the team for almost a year before the events in Boston took him and Alexei off the field for several months. Jamie was notorious for not liking anyone the brass assigned to Alpha Team, though Sean was the latest exception.
Kyle knew part of that was because Sean and Alexei were in a relationship, though that didn’t impede their ability to do their jobs. They weren’t in each other’s chain of command and had already proven in February that they could work in the field together without their relationship taking priority.
Alpha Team was at nine members now, but some days Kyle felt they still weren’t enough to stand against the enemy.
“Find anything, Tank?” Kyle asked as they approached.
Donovan’s enhanced eyesight came with the ability to see in all spectrums. It wasn’t as flashy a power as Madison’s energy blasts or Alexei’s pyrokinesis or even Sean’s ability to phase through solid objects. But in the nitty-gritty of a mission that required stealth, Donovan’s power always came in handy.
“Maybe. I’m seeing space underneath this building,” Donovan said.
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Kyle looked past him at what appeared to be a wing extending off a more centralized administration building rather than the loading dock warehouses.
Records indicated the distribution center had at one time employed thousands of people to ship out goods from an online sales company. Out-of-the-way places like this had come cheap in the past because of the location. The towns that had popped up around the distribution centers tended to house the influx of workers who’d come to earn a minimum wage.
This particular distribution center had closed its doors some fifty-odd years ago, past the time when the desert became too hot to sustain a comfortable environment for the workers due to climate change. After multiple heat-related deaths and dozens of lawsuits by employees, the courts had ordered the closure of the distribution center after a years-long fight.
That didn’t mean it had sat empty over the past few decades.
Located near the border between the United States of America and Mexico, the distribution center was within the trafficking routes used by Mexican cartels and other domestic gangs to move drugs, weapons, and people between and within the two countries. The distribution center may have been abandoned by a legitimate company, but a vacuum always needed to be filled. High desert temperatures were a risk criminals were willing to take in return for the millions of dollars they could make by running their enterprises through here.
The Sons of Adam had a stranglehold in some northern and southern states, but the southwest was usually dominated by Mexican cartels. Chatter had indicated their presence was growing in all states though, and a lot of that had to do with the man now heading that group.
Declan Wolcott had been secretly married to Dr. Valerie Hayes, the former leader of the Sons of Adam. He’d taken over after her death last year. As an ex-Army Ranger who’d lost millions when his private military company, North Star International, was raided by the government last year and his older brother was indicted on separate charges, Declan’s supposedly clean reputation had been destroyed. Labeled a criminal and a terrorist, wanted by the government, he’d fallen in with Stanislav Pavluhkin and thePresnenskaya Bratva.
Trying to outmaneuver a precog of Stanislav’s caliber was a pain in the goddamn ass.
“Viper, we may have something over here,” Donovan reported over the comms. “I don’t recall schematics showing a sublevel.”
“They didn’t,” was Katie’s prompt response.
Kyle jerked his head at the building. “Let’s go take a look. Viper, can you send Wraith our way?”
Copy that,Sean said over the telepathic links Katie had threaded through the team’s minds.Heading your way.
Sean’s phase power disrupted everything electronic, including bioware. Comms were useless for him in the field, which was where Katie’s telepathy came in. He used to be a CIA operative before a Splice attack in Belfast, Northern Ireland turned him into a metahuman. Sean wasn’t supposed to survive that attack, but he had. The man behind it all had also been linked to the attack on MDF headquarters nearly two years ago when a shapeshifting metahuman infiltrated their ranks.
