Incursion

Chapter 6: Interrogation

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After picking up Angel and Goliath, we thoroughly searched both the major and the corporal for any communications equipment or tracking devices. Since Archer was the most tech savvy of us, I had her help me look for any devices that may potentially give away our position to the enemy. However, besides a standard handheld radio on the major, neither of our captives appeared to be carrying anything that could compromise us. I even had Archer check them over for subdermal radios, which were admittedly expensive and still fairly uncommon these days despite their proven utility for hitmen, soldiers, and government agents. After Archer assured me the Steeles were clean, we drove out of Calgary and back to Haven in just under a half hour.

After the bulkhead doors were safely sealed, I told Goliath and Archer to escort the major and the corporal to the one spare storeroom we had down in B3, close to my quarters.

Goliath hauled the major out of the truck and onto his feet. The older man had since awakened during our ride back to Haven and had demanded repeatedly to know where he was being taken and who we were.

“Roger. Any… special ‘requests’?” the weapons specialist eyed me tentatively. I understood his meaning completely.

“I want them secured in chairs facing one another. One plastic table in between them. Hands cuffed behind the chairs. Blindfolds off when they’re safely in the room. No gags. Two buckets of water, a taser, pliers, a power drill, a couple rags, and a metal pipe.”

Josh looked rather serious. I knew he didn’t outwardly approve of this, but that was why I never pushed any of my team to do this themselves. I didn’t expect them to, and I honestly didn’t even want them to. But it needed to be done.

“Sure thing, boss,” was all he said before walking the blindfolded Major Steele over to the elevators at the other end of the rectangular B1 hangar. I watched them go until a different voice at my side drew my attention.

“Knight.”

I glanced to my left, where Genel stood holding Nathan Steele by both arms and looking at me with a grim expression that was much heavier than Josh’s. Of all the people in my life, I knew it was Genel who wanted the most to stop me from doing what she knew I was about to do. I couldn’t really blame her for that – she’d simply first known me as a different person than this.

“Archer?”

She pursed her lips tightly. After a moment, she took a breath and said: “Don’t go too far.”

“That depends on Steele.”

That didn’t placate her even a little, but I knew it wouldn’t. I wasn’t lying, however, when I said how this would go was up to the major.

Genel stared at me for a few seconds before escorting Nathan to the elevators as well without another word.

Right. That leaves…

I turned back to the truck and found Angel hanging back by the passenger side of the hood. She was looking at me with the same tentative expression as Josh’s.

“Angel, is something the matter?”

She didn’t look embarrassed or uncomfortable like usual, to her credit. She walked closer to me until we were standing beside one another.

“Sorry, I was just hanging back. You and Genel seemed a bit… intense.”

I noticed that she was starting to become more open with her thoughts around the team now, and with another successful operation under her belt, I hoped she would become even more comfortable around the rest of us.

“She has a reason to be,” I replied plainly, glancing at her.

Angel looked up at me with a similarly serious expression. “What will you do?”

“Get us answers.”

She paused for a moment, lowering her gaze.

“You don’t have to participate. I don’t expect you to,” I told her.

“Why not?” Her expression was equal parts disappointed and subtly relieved. I could tell by the way her eyes seemed to glint with minor indignation and by the way her shoulders relaxed slightly.

“No reason. It can be unpleasant.”

“Yes, it can be.”

“You’ve done enough tonight. Leave this to me.”

Angel looked back at me with a rather earnest expression this time, but after a moment she seemed to deflate.

“All right,” she said reluctantly.

“I’ll be thorough.”

She did not respond to that. Instead, she asked, “Anything you want us to do in the meantime?”

“None. You and the others are on standby for now. I’ll let you know when I have something.”

Angel simply nodded, then probably deciding she didn’t want to ask any more about what was going to happen, walked off towards the elevators. I waited for her to leave the hangar before moving toward the same elevators and taking one to level B2.

I deposited most of my gear and weapons at the armory, which was empty when I got there. I kept my Walther and two spare magazines with me however, then stopped off at my quarters to drop off my windbreaker, toque, and sweater. I also removed the braided cord from my left wrist and slipped it carefully under my pillow. Once that was done, I left my quarters and headed to the end of the corridor where there was a mostly empty storage room that Shadow Team hardly used.

When I entered the room, I found it brightly lit by the same kind of fluorescents as the ones out in the hallway. The room itself wasn’t large – perhaps just under the size of my quarters, and in the shape of a square. Some empty cardboard boxes were stacked on the far corner of the room, but other than the presence of two other men sitting bound and across a folding plastic table from each other, the room was unremarkable. A tool cart holding the things I asked Josh to prepare for me stood by the door.

Major Bradley Steele sat facing the door I walked into, while his son sat with his back to me. I closed and locked the door from the inside and approached the end of the table, standing between the two soldiers.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

The major glared at me lividly, his nostrils practically flaring in rage. His son, on the other hand, was looking at me with wide eyes and a blatantly apprehensive expression that he was trying to badly conceal under a mask of defiance; he could scowl and huff and puff as much as he liked, but I knew the look of fear in his eyes couldn’t be faked.

“Who the hell are you people, huh?” the major demanded brashly, launching into another one of his verbal barrages that he started in the truck earlier, “Where the hell am I? If you put one finger on me or my son, you will be sorry!”

“I already told you, Major: who we are isn’t important. What is important is who you are, why you’re here, and who you know.”

I slowly walked around the table and behind the major, mostly for effect. I wanted to get right into the questions and get my answers out of the man as fast as possible, but interrogation is a bit of a delicate give-and-take, a mental dance. The ones being interrogated are the ones with their hands tied literally speaking, but control of the situation isn’t always in the interrogator’s court. If the captive senses weakness in the captor’s movements or words, they can capitalize on this and attempt to gain ground in the situation. To avoid this, it’s crucial that the one asking questions doesn’t sound hurried or desperate, because once it becomes apparent their need for answers becomes far greater than the captive’s apprehension during the process, the control shifts to the captive. You want to stay in control, to make your prey believe that the only way out is through your good graces, which they will need to earn their way into.

“If you think you’re going to get anything out of me, you are sorely mistaken,” Steele shot back venomously.

I stopped at the other end of the table, with the major to my left and Nathan to my right.

“Oh, I doubt that very much, Major Steele,” I told him calmly, “See, it’s already a foregone conclusion that you will tell me everything you know. What we’re here to do is to see how things play out from start to end. Do you understand my meaning? The ending is clear, but the blanks in between need filling.”

“Go to hell, you shit. You’ll get nothing from me.”

I quickly grabbed the back of his head and pushed it down, slamming his right cheek hard against the table and eliciting a grunt of pain from the US Army officer. I held him down in place and brought my face close to his upturned ear.

“You’ll talk,” I whispered to him, keeping my voice level, “The only choice you have, is how much it hurts before you do what you’re told.”

That animal voice inside me stirred at this, lifting its head again, but I ignored it for now.

I yanked his head up to bring him back to his original sitting position. I straightened up and resumed slowly revolving around the table.

“Now then,” I began patiently, walking behind Nathan, “What is the US Army’s rationale for attacking Canada?”

Steele glared at me with pure hatred all over his face but did not speak.

“Who’s in charge of operations here in Calgary, Major Steele? Who do you report to?”

“Go fuck yourself,” he spat, gritting his teeth behind closed lips as I could tell from his jaw tightening.

I completed one gradual revolution around the table and without warning, sent a punch straight at the major’s face, keeping one hand on the back of his chair to keep him from tipping over. I felt something bend against my gloved knuckles when my fist connected with his face, and I recognized it instantly as the breaking of the cartilage of his nose in response to the impact. Blood slowly started to trickle down one of his nostrils.

“Wrong answer,” I said quietly.

“You think brutish tactics like this will work on me?” he said loudly, his voice sounding a little warped thanks to the damage I inflicted on his nose. “You really don’t know who I am, do you? I can have you killed in the most painful ways possible, you fucker. Once the Army finds you, you’ll wish you were dead!”

“I’m the one asking questions here. Your job is to give me answers. If you don’t give me answers I like, the pain keeps piling on. Do you understand, Major?”

“You don’t scare me—”

I let go of his chair and continued to revolve around the table again. Once I was behind Nathan, I swiftly unsheathed my tactical knife which I had attached to my belt and brought the tip of the blade down on Nathan’s right shoulder. The younger man screamed in pain as I buried my knife halfway to the handle in a mostly vertical position with respect to the shoulder.

This produced a more favourable response from Steele. He lunged forward in his seat, seething. “You son of a bitch! I’ll kill you!”

I slowly, carefully began to drag the handle of my knife toward the corporal’s back, tearing through skin and muscle little by little.

Raising my voice just enough to be heard over Nathan’s screams and pleas for me to stop, and staring right into the officer’s eyes, I said, “Remember, Major: this is your choice. How much this has to hurt is your call.”

“GAAAAAAAHHHH! HU-AAAAAHHHHHH!!!” Nathan shrieked, struggling in his seat.

I applied consistent pulling force as I continued to drag my knife toward the back of Nathan’s shoulder. Blood stained the fabric of his shirt and started to run down his shoulder and arm. His screams seemed undying, never lowering in volume and ripe with severe physical agony.

The major continued to thrash like a rabid dog against the bonds securing him to his seat for about twenty more seconds before he abruptly shouted, “Okay, STOP!”

I ceased my movement but kept my grip on the handle of my knife. Nathan’s howls were reduced to strained gasps.

The major’s forehead now glistened with sweat and he was breathing more heavily. “I don’t know why the US Army was deployed to this country.”

“Major, if I wanted lies, I’d have asked for lies,” I said in my silkiest voice, then resumed cutting through Nathan’s flesh.

“AAAAAAAHHHHH!! HAAAAAAAAGHHHH!!!”

“STOP! STOP IT! STOP!”

“I will stop,” I said over the screams and cries of the corporal, “when you want me to.”

“I wasn’t told the grand reason behind why we’re doing this, I swear! The orders simply came from the DoD and we were told to occupy the cities!”

I stifled the urge to snort; the DoD, or Department of Defense, was a sorely inappropriate name for the branch of the US government the major referred to. Canada never expressed any intent to compromise the US’ national security. They attacked us first, without provocation.

I stopped my hand around the knife’s handle. “If you don’t know anything Steele, then I don’t need you or your son. Think harder.”

“I swear, I’m telling the truth! Officers were simply assigned cities to hit and occupy and told to subjugate the civilian population. That’s all I know!”

I started to move the knife again in my hand, prompting tears of pain to start streaming from Nathan’s eyes. Sobs started to escape from the soldier’s mouth.

“B-But I heard rumours!” the major added sounding well and truly desperate now. The image I had in my mind of the cold-as-ice, hardened Army major was now rapidly becoming nothing more than a distant misconception.

Freezing my hand again, I stared at his reddened, pleading face and silently prompted him to continue.

“I heard,” Steele said between shallow breaths exacerbated by his damaged nose, “The higher ups and the brass were discussing the United States’ overpopulation problem. Something about the… the concentrations of squatters and freeloaders causing a strain on national resources!”

I did not move from my spot behind Nathan, whose head now tipped forward as he choked back sobs.

“Go on.”

“There were rumours about expanding our territory to compensate for the exceeding population growth we’ve had the last decade. I don’t know anything more concrete than what I’d heard!”

I thought about this for a moment. True, in recent years prior to the US becoming increasingly isolationist, it was in international news that the country was struggling to cope with an increase in the numbers of people being laid off from jobs, mostly from pink collar and some blue collar ones as well. This led to a significant increase in NEETs that are naturally a problem with social and economic impacts to any country. Perhaps related to the rise in unemployed Americans was the surge in population increase in the US over the last decade. Even without immigration, the citizens of America were still increasing in numbers at a rapid rate. This is only conjecture, but it was rumoured that a large part of the US’ reason for its isolationist behaviour the last three or four years was to fight population growth and to offset the strain on its increasingly limited resources to meet demand. Ironically, if this were the case, instead of bolstering economic relations with countries like Canada, the US’ move to clam up and try to control its population growth backfired since it now had to solve its supply and demand problems with no assistance whatsoever from its former trading partners.

Still unconfirmed. Guesses. I need facts, or at least leads I can verify. And this is starting to become rather abstract; Shadow’s mission is to liberate Calgary, not solve the United States’ problems.

“The US, what, wanted to offload some of its ‘problems’ onto Canada, is that it?” I asked Steele. His son had gotten quiet during the last few minutes, though I could still hear him breathing raggedly and sobbing discreetly.

“I don’t know,” Steele insisted, the desperation in his voice thinning slightly when he noticed I was seriously considering his explanation. “I’m not high enough up on the chain of command to confirm what the brass are thinking.”

“Those prisoners you’re keeping in hospitals and at the Stampede,” I said next, changing tack, “Why are you detaining them?”

“How do you know that?” Steele’s eyes widened in apparent surprise.

I again began to dig the blade of my knife deeper into Nathan’s shoulder. The quiet soldier started to raise a cacophony of screams and whimpers that filled the storage room.

“Answer the question,” I said, starting to feel the first traces of impatience creeping in, but I stayed steady.

Steele struggled visibly against his bonds. “Okay, all right! I was given orders to set up a central detainment point by the brass and to keep records of each detainee. Thanks to your health care system, it’s mostly easy to look up records and verify identities based on just your name.”

“Some kind of warped census.”

The major hesitated at first, then nodded with reluctance. “Yes. I was instructed to keep track of each prisoner interred at outposts and camps.”

“Those people unfortunate enough to wind up in your camps, what plans do you have for them?”

Steele did not reply immediately. As I decided to give him another dose of ‘motivation’, he opened his mouth and answered me finally:

“Disposal.”

“What do you mean, ‘disposal’?”

“Exactly what it sounds. Perhaps the rumours I’d heard about the government wanting to expand its territory to acquire space and resources to accommodate its overgrown population have some ring of truth to them.”

I kept silent for several seconds. The implications of this supposed ‘rumour’ ran through my mind. Afterward, I met the major’s eyes with a glare.

“Genocide,” I said aloud, not exactly asking him but simply saying the word in an attempt to gauge the realism of such a thing in this time and place.

Steele said nothing. He bowed his head a little.

“Who do you directly report to?” I demanded, squeezing the handle of my knife still buried in Nathan’s shoulder. “Who’s in charge of all the Army forces in this city?”

Major Steele inclined his head slightly. “Lieutenant Colonel Steven Baker. He has top command of all the troops here.”

“Where do I find him?”

“You’ll never get to him.”

I quickly dislodged my knife from Nathan’s flesh, eliciting a yelp from the young soldier before plunging it back down to gouge another hole in his already bloody shoulder. The corporal let out a hoarse cry and jumped in his chair.

“AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!! PLEASE STOP!” he pleaded as I forcibly twisted the knife lodged in him.

“Damn it, stop that! I’m answering your questions!”

“Not that one, you’re not. Where is Baker? How do I get to him?”

“He’s at the heart of our headquarters in the city – the Hyatt Regency building on Centre Street! But you’ll never get close to him. We’ve stationed our men all over the downtown area and locked it down. You’ll never get through with your numbers.”

He was right about that last bit, at least. The downtown core was the heart of this beast. The four of us wouldn’t be able to punch through their defenses in a straight-up fight. We needed support.

I remembered Angel’s reaction yesterday to the group’s collective thoughts on the intel I acquired from the South Health Campus. I promised her I’d be thorough.

“You’re not intending to wipe absolutely all of us out, are you Major?”

Steel’s eyes widened a little. “What?”

“How many prisoners have you disposed of at this point?”

“We… We’re still finalizing our databases on prisoners’ information. We haven’t gotten to disposal yet.”

“Where were you planning to dispose of the prisoners?”

Steele hesitated a moment but relented under my stare. “We haven’t decided that yet, either. But I do know executions are slated to take place at the Stampede. Or they were, but we lost some men and prisoners in an attack a few days ago.”

He must mean Shadow Team’s surprise assault when we moved in to extract Angel. No point telling him that, though.

“Where are the special cases being taken?” I asked him.

“The… what?”

“I know you’re transferring a handful of prisoners to CFB Calgary at regular intervals. Where do those people go?”

At the mention of CFB Calgary, Steele’s eyes grew and his mouth went agape with shock. He looked truly apprehensive now more than ever when I brought up the prisoners he was having moved to the mysterious location in Calgary’s southwest.

“How… do you know about that place?” he asked, looking borderline shaken.

“Your emails aren’t as secure as you’d like to believe,” I answered him cryptically, just to mess with his mind. Not that it would matter to him in the short or long run, though.

I watched the gears working in his head with some satisfaction as he mulled this over with a frantic look in his eyes.

“Why the segregation?” I demanded steadily, twisting the knife again and prompting Corporal Steele to cry out once more. “Where are the prisoners being taken?”

“I… I don’t know…”

I jammed the blade deeper into Nathan’s flesh, causing his screams to reach an almost deafening crescendo.

The major struggled like a maniac against his restraints. This time, he wasn’t so much defiant as he was just powerless and afraid. His face went bright red with the effort of trying to break free of his bonds and reach his son.

“Please,” he yelled over the sound of his son’s screaming, “Please, I really don’t know! Leave Nathan out of this!”

I abruptly stopped manipulating the tactical knife, letting go of the weapon completely. Nathan’s screams instantly tapered off to grunts, gasps, and whimpers.

“I see,” I said simply, nodding twice.

I turned around and hovered over the tool cart of items I arranged to be brought here. After some quick consideration, I picked up the red cordless power drill and inspected the drill bit, estimating its diameter at two and a half millimetres.

I turned back to Nathan and grabbed the back of his chair with my free hand. I dragged him backwards a little so that his legs were no longer hidden beneath the table. When I began moving him, he visibly started panicking anew.

Bradley Steele saw the tool in my hand and began thrashing in his seat as well. “No… No! No, please… Don’t do this!”

I stood to Nathan’s left side and let the inert drill dangle in my right hand.

“Do you know what the subsartorial artery is, Major?” I asked him quietly.

“What?”

“The subsartorial artery. It’s a branch of the femoral artery, naturally located in the area of the femur. This may occasionally be called the superficial femoral artery, although the term is discouraged in the medical world because the artery is actually far from the surface of the skin.”

“P-Please, I can’t—”

“Arteries are naturally buried deeper in the human body compared to veins. This particular artery is protected by the sartorius muscle in the thigh. Can you guess how thick this muscle is that protects the subsartorial artery?”

Steele started to babble to his son now, temporarily talking past me. “Nathan? Nathan, look at me. Son, I… I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Nathan—”

“Let’s find out,” I finished, then got on one knee and placed the tip of the drill bit to a point just above Nathan’s knee cap. Upon feeling the metal touch the fabric of his pants, Nathan sought my gaze and started shaking his head vigorously.

“Please, sir…” he whispered in a fearful, groveling manner, tears of pain and terror glistening in his red eyes. “Don’t do this… please…”

I ignored the younger man’s pleas and kept my eyes on the major’s. “One more time. Where are those prisoners being taken, Major Steele?”

“You don’t understand,” he blurted, sounding slightly delirious, “I can’t tell you.”

“Who is your contact outside of the USAF? Give me a name.”

“They’ll know I talked! Please, please… Just stop this. They’ll go after my wife and daughter if I breathe a word about them…”

“Is that so? Well, I suggest that in the next several seconds, you think carefully who you value more: your wife and daughter, or your son Nathan.”

The major’s eyes started to fill with tears themselves. He continued to struggle in the hope of breaking free, but for him there was no way out unless I decided there was.

I lightly placed the tip of my index finger on the trigger of the cordless power drill.

“Didn’t I tell you when we started, Major? How this plays out is on you. It’s always been on you,” I reminded him, a frigid calm settling over me like a fog. That animal voice inside started whispering, though I couldn’t make out the words.

“Please,” Bradley Steele begged, all the air of the supposedly dignified officer gone from him. “Just stop! I had to agree to this. They demanded, there’s no denying them; I had no choice!”

“We always have a choice, Major. People with ‘no choice’ are lying to themselves.”

“Have a heart, he’s my son, he’s still young—”

“A heart?” I heard the sinister voice inside me laughing hollowly, though I did not echo it. My contempt rose all the same, but I fought to keep it down. “Major, one of the people on my team was detained at your Stampede camp. She went days with barely any food and was left at the mercy of winter. A lesser fighter would have succumbed long before she got out. One of your men – younger than your son – would have raped and 'disposed' of her if things played out any differently. Now you tell me, do you have a heart?”

I pressed the drill bit harder against Nathan’s leg, trying to steady myself and stop the venom in me from rising too fast. Steele shook his head slightly, pleading to me with fearful eyes to have mercy.

“Now answer me,” I said, my patience wearing dangerously thin, “Where are the prisoners transported to once they reach CFB Calgary? Who is your contact outside of the USAF? I will not ask again.”

Steele opened his mouth, then closed it again. He lowered his head and remained silent.

I depressed the trigger of the power drill.

The following moments were filled with the relentless whirring noise of the drill competing with Nathan’s high-pitched screams as the bit punched through the fabric of his uniform and began carving a hole straight through skin and muscle. His wails filled the room at such a volume that I was sure if someone banged on the door to the room I’d have missed the sound completely. Drops of blood from Nathan’s leg sprayed out in every direction, propelled by the spinning drill bit, splattering the floor, his shirt, my glove, and my clothes the longer I worked the drill through his flesh. Steele kept calling out to his son and begging me to stop ,but I barely heard him. The animal voice growled and snarled, and for some reason those sounds filled my ears much more so than either the drill or the screams ever did.

My mind became increasingly blank the longer the drill worked its way into the corporal’s leg. At some point I became vaguely aware of mercilessly pulling the blood-soaked bit free of the wound I created and standing up to lean over the young soldier’s face.

How about I punch through his eye just a bit this time, Major? Don’t worry, he’ll still have the other one when I’m done.

“STOP! DON’T DO IT! I’LL TELL YOU! I’LL TELL YOU WHAT I KNOW! JUST STOP!”

The shouts coming from the other side of the table were just loud enough for my mind to register what words were being yelled out. Almost as if I’d just come from a deep daydream, I came to and the obnoxious drilling noise and both men’s cries and screams reached me all at once like I was recovering from the deafening effects of a flashbang.

Almost involuntarily, my finger left the power drill’s trigger. Even before the whirring noise ceased, I heard my heart thumping rapidly against my ribs. I felt mildly short of breath.

The growls and snarls had vanished.

I straightened up and moved the now inert drill away from Nathan’s face. The young corporal appeared to have passed out around the same time I became aware of what I was about to do. His head tipped sideways and his eyelids had slid closed. He was bleeding profusely from the hole I drilled into his thigh and judging from the strength with which his blood dribbled out onto the chair and floor, I had damaged a major blood vessel in his leg. The major didn’t seem to know that, however.

I slowly turned around to face the older Steele. His face was now as red as a tomato, tears running freely down his cheeks. Sweat coated his forehead and temples. His breathing was harsh and ragged.

The hand holding the power drill felt as though it was just ‘waking up’ from sleep – numb and tingly. I realized I had the cordless tool in a death grip, so I tried to relax my fingers but found them rather stiff and difficult to unfurl.

Fighting to appear calm and collected, I spoke to the major. My voice thankfully came out level and flat.

“Talk.”

Steele took a few seconds to gather his breath, then said hoarsely, “All I know about my contact is that he calls himself ‘Hornet’. I’ve met him only once, during the first round of prisoner transfers on the twenty-first. I couldn’t see his face as he had a hood on, but his uniform was black, unmistakably military. He didn’t… didn’t speak much.”

“What did he tell you?”

“To keep him supplied with ‘meat’… he said. Prisoners…”

“That’s all? He didn’t say why?”

“I-I didn’t ask. I was instructed by higher ups not to ask questions. I was just… just following orders… You must understand…”

I had no interest in sob stories from him, so I pressed him further.

“How many prisoners are you giving this ‘Hornet’ each time? How often?”

“Twenty prisoners each round,” Steele answered, his head bowed now out of exhaustion from screaming and yelling. “I don’t escort the trucks to CFB Calgary every time – I went only the one time. Hornet mentioned he wanted one batch every three days.”

“The first was on the 21st.”

“Yes…”

I did some quick counting in my head. If that were true, then four batches of prisoners had already been transported to CFB Calgary since the city was occupied, and if ‘three days’ was a rule consistently being followed—

“When’s the next delivery?” I asked the major.

Steele’s nose had by now stopped leaking blood. Dried crusts ran down to his lips and chin. His voice was now quite different from before we started the interrogation.

“January 2nd,” he replied wearily, still bowing his head and slumping forward in his seat. “Same place, at…at 2000 hours.”

Two days from now. It might be worth investigating the next shipment of prisoners when it arrives then.

“All right.”

“M-my son… Nathan… is he…?”

I put the bloody power drill down on top of the tool cart and pushed Nathan’s face up by lifting his forehead. His eyes were glassy and his pupils failed to contract in response to the light shining into them. I checked him for a pulse by touching the side of his neck but found none. The blood that was pouring out of his leg had slowed and tapered off to a trickle.

Letting go of his head, I drew my Walther from my holster. “He’s dead.”

“No,” Steele moaned, his voice breaking as he sniffed noisily through a clogged nose, “No… Nathan… No…”

I turned to face the older man, who was shaking his head slowly from side to side. He kept muttering and sobbing his son’s name, well and truly done and spent.

Raising my arm and aiming my handgun, I pulled the trigger once and silenced the major permanently.

I’d heard enough.