Ten

 

KYLE

 

It’s been a week since we went to the gathering and nothing has happened yet. That didn’t mean that nothing would happen, though, and if it was possible the Knights were getting tenser. The team were used to situations like this, but I could see that even they were twitching, waiting for the shit to drop.

We’d just gotten a hold on where Demingo was hiding and Hunter and the rest of Valiant were joining us in the fun about to be had. At the moment, there was a bit of bad blood between him and Preacher as his prospects had been meant to be watching Piper when she was taken. Instead, they’d focused on finding some shelter from the storm and had fucked up.

Unrolling an aerial photo of the property Demingo was hiding in, I ignored the tension and started the briefing.

“Data ran a search on high traffic in these areas, but isolated the ones related to Demingo. Twenty minutes ago, we sent drones to three of the properties and got this photograph back from our Charlie Drone,” I pointed at the huge piece of paper. “As you can see, at the time it was taken at, oh-nine-seventeen, there was a helo here,” I pointed at an area that was only obvious if you knew what you were looking for. The netting was designed to blend in with the surrounding area, but underneath it, just visible, was the faint outline of the rotor blades of the small helo. “Over here,” I pointed over to the track that looked fresh in the tall grass that the area was surrounded in, “we have an area where they’ve parked their vehicles, again attempting poorly to camouflage them.” I waited as they all looked at the areas that I’d pointed out. “They’ve got someone stationed over here,” Jagger pointed at a wooded area where you could just see the barrel of a large gun.

“Oh goody,” Hunter growled. “They want to play rough!” I couldn’t help smirking at the expression I was so fond of using when the baddies decided to come out to play.

I opened the smaller roll of paper that I had and laid it out. “Charlie Drone is a prototype created by the Ghosts. We haven’t yet pitched the idea to the government, and quite frankly, if it wasn’t for the rest of the military whose lives were on the line, we most likely wouldn’t,” I had to stop myself from airing some new grievances that I had. “So, Charlie Drone is pretty fucking awesome. This was the more complex of the three locations which was why we sent it in. It’s like the Stealth bombers of the military drone world. It can travel at further distances by carrying extra charging cells that are spread throughout the device to create an even distribution of weight. It also has a higher-powered camera than Alpha and Bravo drones, meaning that it stays at an undetectable distance and gets these high rez photos for us to enjoy.”

Pointing down at the new paper, I saw as they took in the eight photos of Demingo. Two of him were in his bathroom, one was him looking worriedly out of the window of the property, and the other two were of him eating his breakfast on the porch of the property looking cocky as two men stood guard. The next two showed the men walking away and Demingo looking worried. The final photo was my favorite and would fuck him up when he saw it – him lying asleep in his bed.

Hunter looked happier than I’d ever seen him which said something as he’d changed completely since getting Piper back into his life and discovering that he had a son. “I have a plan,” he chuckled. I loved working with this guy. Jared was gone, apparently called away on a job, otherwise I’d have had Hunter assessing him while he was here. Something was just off about him.

 

 

When we’d gone into one of Demingo’s “orgy houses”, we kept back a few of the weapons that they’d been storing there. You never knew when they would come in handy and we hadn’t had the opportunity to use one and see what they were capable of, yet. Now, I was getting to try one out.

Hunter was in position with his team and Data, and we’d found a place for me to stretch out and wait until it was time.

We were all linked into the same system, an untraceable one set up by Data. I watched on my screen as Charlie Drone picked up the moment Demingo got the first text from Hunter, the photo of him asleep in his bed. The panic that took over him was priceless, as he dropped the phone and started to pace the room.

Then his phone beeped again, he walked back over to it and quickly peeked at the screen, a look of fury taking over as he read the message before it beeped again and he suddenly dropped it on the floor. The sound of Danza Kuduro played softly through the screen of my device and I thought back to the footage Data had shown me earlier of Demingo dancing and singing to it in the bathroom that morning. It was enough to turn anyone’s stomach.

“What the fuck?” he roared as he watched it playing out on the floor. Data had overridden his phone so that it wouldn’t go into the lock mode on it and the clip played on repeat where the phone lay on the floor. “Come out you fucking coward!”

“Well, that’s rich,” I whispered to Duke. “We’re not the ones hiding in the boonies now, are we?”

I received a message telling me to be ready and sent back confirmation that I was in position. I looked down at the screen as Data hacked into Demingo’s phone again and played a split-screen on it which now in his hand. The top one had the live feed from his camera facing up at him, and the bottom one was a night vision one of his property obviously been shot from a distance. His face quickly became smug as he saw the distance and figured that the small amount of reinforcements that had been added to his walls would keep him safe.

The weapon that we seized was a military prototype which had explosive bullets similar to RPG’s on a much smaller scale in size. They had more powerful explosives inside them and the fact that his men had them, was enough to have me suspecting a number of people. When I found out who it was, I was going to make them suffer. I was pissed at the higher ups for not making it clear that these weapons were missing.

I lined up my sight with where it was needed and checked the wind direction and speed making the necessary adjustments. Once I was set up, I double clicked my throat mic letting Hunter know I was ready. It was his fiancée who was taken and this was his show.

I watched through the scope as Demingo went into a panic at whatever was playing now on his screen and moved across the room. The click in my ear was my signal and I pressed the trigger deploying one of the missile type bullets. It hit the side of the house and the extra explosives that Jagger and the guys had wired up ten minutes previously, exploded at the same time.

The force of the explosion rocked the ground and something happened that had never happened to me in my life – I fell out of the tree.

“Fuck me,” I groaned, coughing and rubbing my throat, forgetting that it would activate the throat mic and broadcast this moment of humiliation to everyone.

“Kyle,” Jagger yelled as he ran toward me with Preacher. “What the fuck?”

Duke, the big fat bastard, just stood next to the trunk of the tree that had ejected me, laughing.

“How much C4 did you use?” I croaked into the throat mic. “Warn me next time, you dickheads.”

The pain in my arm registered and I let out a string of expletives. It felt like it was broken. Jagger and Preacher reached me at that moment and started checking me over. I hated being fussed over like this and the fact that I had fallen was still pissing me off, so I slapped their hands away with my good arm and told them to fuck off. The whole time all I could hear was Duke laughing and I swore I’d get him back.

 

JAGGER

 

Things were just settling back down again when the shit storm we’d all been waiting for happened. We’d just come back from the Valiant Compound and were finally relaxing when the shit hit the fan. A call had come in from Data saying he knew who the leak, within the MC, was - the President of the 412 MC. He had a twenty-eight-year-old daughter who I vaguely remembered being told about, called Olivia.

It seemed he was working with the traffickers and was so involved that he’d even set his own daughter up to be sold to them. We thought he was on our side and had involved him in some of the details of what was going on, but he’d been enjoying the financial rewards of being a filthy fuck the whole time.

We had just sat down to hash out the details of how we were going to deal with him, which involved us taking his daughter, too, to keep her safe, when the first rounds of gunfire hit the side of the building. Somehow, they had gotten past our guards and had snuck up on us. We were so involved in this new revelation, that we hadn’t even heard anything from outside. The fact that we were always on guard and that we had the Ghosts too, meant that they had to have had information on the layout of our compound, as well as what areas to hit that were the weakest.

“Fucking shit!” Preacher roared as we ran to the armory to get our assault rifles. Guns weren’t going to do much against what was hitting us. There was a standard defense procedure in place and I didn’t doubt that Kyle, Duke and the Ghosts would know what to do. The fact that she wasn’t beside me was a distraction that I couldn’t afford; I would have to trust in her skills. Fortunately, she hadn’t broken her arm when she fell out of the tree, it was just badly bruised, so she didn’t have that holding her back.

As we took up our positions, we saw the volume of men around us and my anger spiked. Who the fuck did these bastards think they were?

I heard the shots coming from inside the building as some of the guys outside started to fall and knew that the Ghosts were opening fire. Shouting out to the MC to join them, we all pressed our triggers, hitting the group in front of us. The rest of the MC were stationed throughout the building, covering all of the entrances and I hoped that they were having the same result that we were.

“Has anyone else noticed that the bullets aren’t hitting where we are anymore?” Gauge shouted over the noise around us. Now that he pointed it out, he was right. It’s like they were aiming at a specific place, but where?

A couple of us were hunkered down changing our magazines when explosions went off outside and I realized that Kyle had brought out the military prototype that she’d kept from the stash retrieved from Demingo’s men. A shout to leave came from outside and we watched as the assholes turned and ran toward the open gate of the compound. I had a firm policy to never shoot a man in the back, but these bastards had come onto our territory and had shot at our backs, so I didn’t give the order to stand down until I knew they were all gone.

There were a lot of groans and cries from the injured outside and I gave the order for the paddy wagons to be brought round and for the men to be dumped closer to where the gathering for the traffickers had been held that night. At the same time, a team went out to run reconnaissance on the surrounding area to make sure that they had all left and weren’t coming back. If they did, this time we’d be ready.

Storming out of the front door as the bodies were gathered up, I looked at the building and took in the damage. There were bullet holes everywhere, none of which had come through the thick walls, but as I looked up at where Kyle was leaning over part of the roof, I saw the extent of the damage to the area under her and realized – they’d fucking been aiming at her!

“What the fuck!” came the roar from before I could get it out. Turning around, I saw the furious, red face of Preacher as he saw what I did and came to the same conclusion.

They’d drawn us to different areas of the building, waiting for it to become clear where the Ghosts were when they started shooting. They would be more precise and Kyle used her rifle instead of the automatic weapons we used. Once they figured that out, they’d trained their weapons on that location.

Storming back inside the building, Preacher started yelling, giving orders to get the President of the 412, Satan, and bring him here. He knew them, so he’d know where we would find them.

This shit was going to end.