Page 2 of Magnum, Volume 2

I watched Squatch take a security guy down, put him in a hogtie with zip-ties, and then add duct tape. The goal was to keep from killing them, if possible. The bikers wanted them dead, but this was going to go public in a big damned way, and the less people dead, the better.

Ninety seconds after we went in, I heard Skippy say, “Fuck. Deal with the guests first, and make damned sure they don’t flip it, so a guest pretends to be a fighter.”

Skippy had headphones on, so I couldn’t hear what was happening in his feeds. I focused on my people, giving them a heads-up when there were problems, watching the infrared cams our guys had positioned around the guest buildings, and keeping an eye on everything else I was responsible for.

“Shit,” McGyver said, and my screen changed to a row of Lucite rooms with a single person in most, two people in a couple. There were at least a dozen rooms on either side of a hallway, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that’s how they were housing the fighters. It’d be like living in a damned fishbowl.

But the cam I was looking through had Magnum holding one man in a choke hold and Dementor holding another. “Which is prisoner and which is guest?” McGyver asked.

“Magnum’s guy is Josh McDaniel, taken in Chicago. Dementor’s guy is Robert Miller, lobbyist for big pharma.” Josh was naked and cuffed with his arms behind his back. Robert’s pants were down, and he was sporting a huge hard-on.

My screen changed to another of the Lucite rooms, and I gave them the name of the prisoner, but I didn’t know the guest, who was also pants-less, though without an erection. Fuck, had these men paid to sleep with the fighters? And wasn’t it obvious that the cuffed men were the prisoners?

Before I could ask questions, I was back on Ember’s cam. I did a fast scan of the area and told her, “Movement inside cabin eleven.” More red caught my eye, and I said, “First though, got a heat signature moving in the back of the kitchen area, in the dining hall.”

For hunt weekends, the place was kind of set up like an African safari, so the huge dining hall resembled a great big tent, even though it was permanent. The building was without all the extra fabric now, and the view from the thermographic camera on the drone flying over the site told me someone was moving around in the kitchen.

Guests weren’t supposed to have guns on the premises, but every employee except the maids did, even wait staff and cooks.

“Roger that,” Ember said. “Heading to the kitchen.”

I told her exactly what I was seeing and suggested which doors to use. Her team split up and rushed in from the outside and from the dining room. I heard gunshots, saw a barrel pointed right at Logan and flashing, but he kept moving. Didn’t slow even a tiny bit before he took the bastard down with his bare hands.

I know I saw blood through Ember’s cams, but no one mentioned anyone being shot. There was no way Logan was okay, but he was still talking.

I watched them hogtie and duct tape the man who’d shot at them and then move out like nothing had happened.

“Heading to cabin eleven,” Charlie Two said.

And then McGyver’s voice was back, “We need you in two places at once. Someone else will monitor the infrared for Charlie Team. I’m gonna feed you images of people we need ID for.”

“Roger that,” I said, because they’d worked and worked with me to get me to stop saying, “Okay.”

I’m good at compartmentalizing, but it was still hard to see people I’d been looking for right there, wearing shock collars and leather cuffs on their wrists and ankles, lean and muscled — most with haunted looks in their eyes. I stayed focused on the job at hand and identified nearly everyone they showed me.

And I could see the looks in their eyes when one of our guys called them by name. “Billy Long, it’s going to be okay. We’re here to get you out.” And the eyes went from hostile and wary to disbelieving and hopeful.

But one of the prisoners was fighting them. A woman, and they only had men downstairs. “Her name is Annie. Tell her that her brother and twin sister put flyers up looking for her, and they are still annoying the shit out of the detective assigned to her case. Tell her that her family is looking for her.”

Magnum’s calm voice talked to her until she listened to him, and only then could he release the hold he’d had on her, trying to keep her from beating the shit out of him. She’d been chained to the bed, but her arms had been free.

The shock collars were a problem, and the prisoners were clear the damned things had to come off before they could leave the area, lest they get a shock powerful enough to knock them out or possibly straight-up kill them.

Without another word, Sloan walked over to a guard and did something to him that made him talk — the guard’s voice clearly in pain while he told them the password for the system and then how to shut the collars down. At the time, I had no idea what Sloan did to make a hardened operative spill so fast. Later, I found out the two went through SEAL training together and that he was, in Sloan’s words, a pansy ass who successfully pretended to be a badass until he went through SERE. Also, Sloan had known about an old injury, and exactly where to press his fingers to make the bastard hurt. Having Sloan on our side meant our guys disabled the collars, unlocked them, and had the prisoners headed upstairs less than ten minutes after arriving at the Lucite hallway.

During all of this, I caught a glimpse of Mason Barnes in the background, talking to Bravo Five, his eyes clearer than in any photo I’d seen of him, but before I could think on it too hard, I was back with Charlie Team. I quickly grabbed Gears’ wrist and gave it two squeezes — the sign to let him know his brother was alive. Completely against protocol, but our foursome had agreed that if any of us saw him, we’d let Gears know right away.

The rest of the op, I mostly identified guests I thought might be more or less difficult for our people to deal with, though it turned out I only recognized maybe a third of them.

Later, I would find out that, during the day, guests could pay to go to the Lucite rooms and fuck the fighters. Each hole had a different price, and it was up to them whether the fighters were restrained or loose.

And, it turned out, one of the guests liked a specific fighter enough to pay a great deal to sleep with him during fight weekends. Seemed like a pretty big risk, to me, but I guess he figured the guards would make sure he woke up alive and in one piece. As for the asshole with his pants down, he’d awakened in the middle of the night and decided to go downstairs and fuck a fighter — and one could apparently pay to do exactly that at any time of the day. Even right as the prisoner came out of a fight, when he or she was still amped up from it.

I had a list of nearly three hundred who’d gone missing, and we only brought thirty-one fighters up from that Lucite hellhole, but once we started talking to the fighters, we learned there were four fights to the death every weekend, plus others sometimes died during or after a fight. Also, if someone tried to escape and the shock collar went off, even if they survived it, they were never the same again.

We also learned there were four fighters who’d either recently been killed or were somewhere else on the premises, in a clinic of sorts. “Sometimes,” a big guy named Junior said, “when one of us is knocked out, they disappear and never come back. Sometimes, they’re back in a few days, and they talk about a hospital-type area.”

Bravo Team decided this meant it was time to infiltrate the new building, the one we hadn’t been able to find anything about. No one had come out of it, and they had to know shit was going on outside. But the seven heat signatures inside — four lying down and three standing — were staying put. Had they hoped we wouldn’t notice the building off to the side, away from everything?