Chapter 4 - The Black Bay
The drive down Interstate 64 toward Norfolk was silent save for the rhythmic slap of the windshield wipers against the glass. The storm had followed the coastline, turning the pine barrens of eastern Virginia into a sodden, black wilderness of thrashing branches and standing water.
I stopped at the Naval Support Activity annex at zero-two-forty.
Bay Seven was tucked behind the secondary dry docks, beneath a concrete overhang that had been built during the Cold War to shelter submarine communications gear. The aluminum key slid into the mechanical tumbler with a heavy, oiled click.
The steel roll-up door rose three feet, just enough for me to duck beneath the threshold.
Inside, the bay smelled of cosmoline, gun oil, and vulcanized rubber.
Sitting in the center of the bay was an unmarked, matte-black Chevrolet Suburban with run-flat commercial tires, Level IV ballistic steel plating in the door panels, and two-inch-thick polycarbonate windows.
Mounted in the rear cargo area, secured within heavy-duty steel lockboxes, was the kit I hadn't touched since the night we pulled four hostages out of an insurgent compound outside Misrata.
I worked without haste.
First, the armor: a Crye Precision Jumpable Plate Carrier with Level IV ceramic strike faces, rated to stop multiple rounds of .30-06 armor-piercing ammunition. Over that went the combat shirt in black ripstop, the reinforced trousers with integrated knee pads, and the tactical belt containing my secondary sidearm—a Heckler & Koch USP Tactical .45 with an Osprey suppressor.
Next, the utility kit: four thermal breaching charges, two high-velocity flashbangs, a motorized hydraulic spreader capable of prying open reinforced bank vault doors, and an electronic bypass deck designed by the National Security Agency to scramble civilian security relays.
Finally, the primary weapon: a suppressed Daniel Defense MK18 carbine, ten-and-a-half-inch barrel, fitted with an infrared illuminator and an EOTech holographic sight paired with a three-power magnifier.
I checked the magazines. Thirty rounds each of 5.56mm Black Hills 77-grain open-tip match ammunition. Heavy lead designed to transfer every foot-pound of kinetic energy into bone and soft tissue without exiting through the secondary wall.
I did not pray. I did not look at a picture of Sophie.
If you bring a child's memory into an operational breach, your hands hesitate. If your hands hesitate by three-tenths of a second, the enemy's trigger finger completes its arc, and your child wakes up in a hospital bed with no mother to hold her syringe.
I checked the time: zero-three-fifteen.
The drive from Norfolk across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to Cape Charles took forty-eight minutes.
The storm had emptied the seventeen miles of concrete spans. Huge, black swells rolled beneath the trestles, crashing against the concrete pilings with a dull, subterranean roar that shook the chassis of the Suburban. Out in the middle of the bay, the light from the navigational buoys flashed red-green-red through the gray rain like dying stars.
The turn-off for the Ellison estate was two miles south of the township of Cape Charles, marked only by an unpaved sand road that wound through four hundred yards of maritime loblolly pine.
At the halfway point sat the security perimeter: two stone gateposts flanking an eighteen-foot wrought-iron gate topped with outward-curving security spikes. Mounted above the gate were three high-definition commercial security cameras with integrated thermal sweeps.
Inside the glass-fronted gatehouse sat two men.
I killed the Suburban’s headlights four hundred yards out, coasting to a stop beneath the overhanging branches of a water oak. I activated the vehicle’s master infrared array, pulled down my night-vision goggles, and stepped out into the black mud.
The world resolved into crisp, phosphorescent shades of bright green and gray.
Through the tubes of the NVGs, I watched the two guards inside the gatehouse. They were wearing dark security uniforms with the embroidered crest of Ellison Maritime Security on their shoulders. One of them was leaning back in his chair with his feet on the counter, watching a sports broadcast on a tablet. The other was standing by the coffee maker, his service pistol holstered on his hip, completely oblivious to the woods around him.
Amateurs. Men who had spent ten years working executive protection details for corporate executives, confusing an expensive uniform with tactical competence.
I moved through the pines along the drainage ditch on the western edge of the road.
My boots were silent in the wet pine needles. The rain covered the rustle of my uniform, the cold wind blowing directly into my face, carrying my scent away from the two Belgian Malinois dogs penned in the kennel behind the gatehouse.
I reached the limestone pillar in sixty seconds.
I reached up, tapped a single magnetic RF-scrambler against the conduit leading from the primary security camera, and pulled the tactical breaching blade from my vest.
The blade was twelve inches of blackened D2 steel, weighted for cutting heavy composite cables. I severed the secondary power loop with one clean, downward strike.
Inside the gatehouse, the tablet screen flickered once and went black. The interior lights dropped to the red emergency backups.
The guard with his feet on the counter sat up, swearing softly. "Hey... Miller, did the generator trip again?"
"I told Grant that transfer switch was corroded," the second guard grumbled, reaching for the doorknob. "Let me go check the breakers out back."
He turned the brass handle. He pushed the heavy wooden door open three inches.
I took the door with my left palm, driving it back into his face with the full force of my body weight.
The wood slammed into his nose with a wet, splintering crunch. He didn't even have time to cry out; his knees buckled, his skull striking the doorframe before he slumped onto the linoleum floor, unconscious before his service weapon cleared the holster.
The first guard leaped from his chair, his hand clawing at his Glock 17.
He was too slow.
I cleared the threshold in two flat strides, dropped my center of mass, and drove the palm of my right hand upward into his sternum, catching him just beneath the xiphoid process.
The impact drove every ounce of air from his lungs with a sharp, wheezing whuff.
Before he could recover his balance, I caught him by the back of his tactical vest, spun him one hundred and eighty degrees, and drove his face down onto the Formica counter. The tablet cracked beneath his chin. I pulled his right arm behind his back, torqued the wrist until the radius locked, and pressed the cold, round muzzle of the suppressed HK .45 directly against his ear canal.
"Breathe through your nose," I whispered.
The guard froze. The smell of his sweat was immediate—hot, sour, saturated with the animal terror of a man who has suddenly realized the sheep he was hired to watch had just evolved into a wolf.
"Don't... don't shoot," he choked out, his vocal cords vibrating against the counter. "Please. I'm just on the night shift. I don't know anything about the family."
"You know where the master gate override switch is," I said.
"Under the red panel," he gasped, his eyes darting toward the metal junction box beneath the desk. "The toggle on the left. The yellow one."
"Who is in the main house right now?"
"Grant... Grant is there," the guard stammered, urine spreading in a dark, warm stain through the front of his uniform trousers. "And Caleb. They have four guys from the maritime detail with them. They're in the library... they've been drinking since midnight."
"And Harold?"
"The old man is in Richmond," he whispered. "He's at the Commonwealth Club. He’s meeting with the state attorney’s people."
I reached down, flipped the yellow toggle with my left thumb, and listened as the heavy iron gates groaned open forty yards away.
Then I brought the hard polymer grip of the .45 down against the back of his neck, striking the carotid sinus with measured, non-lethal pressure.
His eyes rolled back. His body went limp, sliding off the stool and onto the floor beside his partner.
I pulled two pairs of heavy-duty nylon flex-cuffs from my belt, secured their wrists behind their backs, taped their mouths with three wraps of olive-drab duct tape, and stepped back out into the rain.
May you like
The path to the main house was clear.
Two hundred yards of dark crushed shell road, winding between two rows of hundred-year-old live oaks draped in Spanish moss, leading toward the glowing windows of the great house where Grant and Caleb Ellison were celebrating their victory over a seven-year-old child.
