Five updates in as many days? Yeah, I'm awesome, I know. Bask in the warmth of my awesome-ness.
Oh, and NerdyNinja? Tell me if you find the reference.
Katrina opened the door to the Hive, and I instantly noticed the quietly tense atmosphere. Prince stood in the middle by the pedestal, surrounded by the military types, speaking into a cell phone rapidly. People went this way and that, each intent on their work, but none spoke. I quickly found out why once we made our way down the stairs and into the center. A man in olive drab dress turned, and I was once again greeted by General Dexide, his hand extended for me to shake. I grasped his, and he shook it once, a curt and terse greeting. “Mr. Winters, we are glad to see you up and about at last. It was a bit touch and go there in the beginning, but we’re happy that you pulled through.”
“So am I,” I muttered, turning to Prince, who had just hung up his phone. “So what’s the deal? You’ve found them?”
“It certainly seems that way,” he replied, looking through the folder on the nearest desk. “You’re not gonna believe where though.”
With a few presses of a button, the screen on the wall changed from a view of the entire planet, to a small corner of eastern Afghanistan. Highlighted in red was the location, and I raised an eyebrow. The name was familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. “Tora Bora?” I asked.
“Seems like it,” Dexide answered. “I remember that battle too. Five days of airstrikes, bombing runs, and ground fighting near the start of the war on terror, and the bearded bastard slipped through our fingers.”
“You’re talking about bin Laden, right?”
“Yes,” Prince interrupted. “We thought he was holed up in the caves, and sent in a task force of clandestine service and Special Forces operatives. It was worse than we thought, considering that we dropped twenty men in the beginning, and had to call for support.”
“That war ended seven years ago though. Why are you telling me this?” I questioned.
Dexide was the one to answer. “We fought them on the ground first, and they fled to the cave network. Once there, they dug in for the long haul. The caves are extensive, able to hold and house around four hundred men. Our intel suggests that Neal started a training camp a few years ago somewhere in Afghanistan, but we dismissed it. One of the analysts recently re-tasked a satellite on a hunch, and it paid off.”
He motioned to Prince, who slipped three photos from the folder and placed them on the podium between us. Black and white high definition photos showed a barren expanse of what looked like desert, with a single mountain rising taller than the few smaller mounds surrounding it. “This was the complex we bombed looking for him, but intel suggested then that he escaped into Pakistan, the border of which was supposed to be heavily guarded,” Dexide explained. “The important thing is, once we removed the Al-Qaeda forces from it, it was left unused. The soldiers from the nearby Air Force base guarded it until our forces were pulled out in twenty-fourteen, and to our knowledge it’s been defunct since.”
He pointed to another photo, obviously taken with an infrared camera, with multiple human-shaped splotches of red here and there. “These were taken three months ago, and intel suggests that it is in use now the training camp by Neal’s forces. He’s been recruiting from the local population, promising them God knows what as incentive for becoming his assassins.”
“How do we know that my family is there?”
“We don’t,” Dexide answered. “But it’s a start on picking up their trail.”
YOU ARE READING
The Edge Of Justice
ActionIt has been eleven years since Christian Winters brought the plans of his old Sensai, Michael Neal, to an abrupt and bloody halt. His daughter Haley, named after the woman he loved and lost, is training with both her father and mother, becoming a fo...
