“Colonel, if you’re not—”
“I said I was fit!” the Colonel said. “I can execute your Goddamned operation better than anybody else you can hand the job to!”
The Suit gave him a cold smile. “Yes, you will have your joke, won’t you?” he said. “Very well.”
He shifted one, then two sheets from the right side of the folder to the left and said, “You’ll be inserted with a twenty-man team to eliminate an Enemy base. We believe it’s a medical unit, but there’ll doubtless be a security element attached. You should be fine if you execute a quick in-and-out.”
The Suit flipped another page. You’ll be fine, you smug sonuvabitch, the Colonel thought, because you won’t be within a hundred klicks of the sound of gunfire. You’ll be drinking in a bar with your Savile Row and Armani colleagues, talking solemnly about the strain of your position.
The Colonel had gotten the job through an Australian friend, Macgregor. Mac was dead now, killed trying to start the motor of his Zodiac boat during some goatfuck in the Seychelles, the Colonel had heard. Maybe true, maybe not. Rumors hadn’t gotten any more accurate than they’d been before things started to come apart.
The Colonel doubted Mac had known any more about the employer than he had himself. Suits were looking for people with special skills for work in the international security field—just like always. The pay was good.
The Colonel wasn’t stupid; he wouldn’t have survived this long without more raw brainpower than most of the Suits who tasked him. He’d realized a long time ago that the pay was just an excuse. He was doing this work because the only time he felt alive was when he was doing the work, and he wasn’t ready to die.
When the Colonel figured out who his employer was, he didn’t much like it. But neither did the knowledge make any real difference in what the Colonel did or how well he did it.
“Here’s the map of the terrain,” the Suit said, handing over a folded document. “You can study it as long as you wish, but it can’t leave the room, of course.”
“Of course,” the Colonel said. Suits were always jealous of their secrets, their Sources and Methods. A captured map might tell the Enemy what we knew and how we’d learned it. In this particular case, the Enemy being who He was, that was even funnier than the usual Suit bullshit.
The map was satellite imagery overlaid with contour lines and elevations noted in meters. A hollow triangle marked the objective. The satellites hadn’t been up for the past six months, though the Colonel was losing track of time. Still, the mountainous terrain itself wasn’t likely to have changed much.
There were no landmarks familiar to the Colonel. He waved a corner of the map to the tasking officer. “Where is this?” he asked.
“The operation doesn’t require that you have that information,” the Suit said coolly.
The Colonel looked at him and smiled. Eyes bulging outward. A spray of blood from the nostrils as the bullet acts as a piston in the chamber of the skull.
He went back to studying the map.
“You’ll insert by air,” the Suit said. “The vehicle will remain under your operational control and will extract you at the completion of the mission.”
“Enemy forces?” the Colonel said, his eyes on the map.
“In the region as a whole, considerable,” the Suit said. He shrugged. “Brigade strength, we believe. But the site you’re to eliminate should have no more than a platoon present for security. The Enemy won’t be able to bring greater forces to bear in the time available—if you do your job properly.”
“Yes, all right,” the Colonel said. He stood up and handed back the map. The right knee caught him as it always did, the calling card of a paradrop into bamboo when he was nineteen and thought he was indestructible. “I’m ready to meet my unit.”
The Suit replaced the map within the folder. “Very well,” he said. “One of the service personnel is waiting outside the door. He’ll lead you to your men.”
The Colonel paused before touching the doorknob and looked back. Maybe it was the “if you do your job properly” that made him angry enough to say, “Does it bother you to be working for the losing side?”