Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 006

"Thirteenth floor, clear!"

Soren lowered his AR-15 carbine and let out a slow breath. His lungs were working harder than he'd like to admit. The body he was wearing had decent baseline fitness, but decent wasn't the same as conditioned, and whatever this version of himself had been doing the night before, it hadn't been sleep. Delta Five's theory about the previous evening was starting to feel less like a joke and more like a diagnosis.

"Two floors left," Delta One said, clicking off the radio and turning to face the group. "Alpha Team and Charlie Team are already up there. Our job is to hold this landing and make sure nothing slips past us on the way down. If you need a minute, take it. Everyone else, eyes on the stairwell."

"A few flights of stairs and you're winded?" Delta Five said, glancing around with an easy grin. "Come on."

"Some of us are carrying more than a rifle." Delta Two's voice was flat, the tone of a man who had said nothing for the better part of an hour and had chosen his moment carefully. He set the ballistic shield against the wall and rolled his shoulder once, working out something that had been sitting there for a while.

He had a point. The shield, the extra plating, the full load of ammunition: Delta Two had been hauling close to eighty pounds of gear up thirteen floors of a building with no working elevators, and he'd done it without complaint until now. The single remark was practically a speech.

Delta Three leaned against the wall and looked up at the ceiling. "What's the story on these guys, anyway? That's a lot of firepower for a random crew."

"Smugglers," Delta Six offered. "Illegal entry, I heard."

"The Mexi crew," Delta One said. "They were moving weapons across the border when they ran into a CIA undercover agent. Killed him before they knew who he was." He paused. "The man downstairs who was doing all the shouting? That was the dead agent's supervisor."

Delta Three let out a low whistle. "No wonder they're going down hard. You don't accidentally kill a CIA man and walk away from it."

"They didn't even know what they had," Delta One said, with a slight shrug. "Wrong place, wrong time, for everyone involved."

"That explains why the guy on eleven kept calling us CIA," Soren said, more to himself than anyone else. The pieces fit together cleanly now: a crew that had stumbled into the worst possible situation and was reacting with the cornered, scorched-earth logic of people who already knew how the story ended.

Before anyone could respond, the gunfire from above returned, louder this time, and closer. Not isolated shots but a sustained exchange, the kind that moved through a building the way a storm moves through a valley, filling every space with noise and then going quiet all at once.

Then it was getting closer. Floor by floor, working its way down.

"Weapons up," Delta One said, and the conversation ended.

Every member of Delta Team brought their rifle to bear on the stairwell above them. The landing went silent except for the sound of breathing and the distant, muffled reports from the upper floors, each one a fraction nearer than the last.

The fifteenth-floor fire door exploded open.

A man came through it at a dead run, AK rifle in hand, moving with the blind momentum of someone who had already stopped thinking and was operating entirely on the instinct to keep moving. He made it three steps onto the landing before the combined fire of Delta Team stopped him completely. He went down and stayed down.

"Target down."

A beat of silence. Then the fire door opened again, slower this time, and a familiar face leaned through.

"Fifteenth floor is clear. All hostiles eliminated."

The tension on the landing dissolved like smoke. Around Soren, he could hear it in the way people exhaled, the way rifles came down from shoulders, the way Delta Two sat down on the stairs without ceremony and said nothing at all. It was over. The building was secure.

Soren looked at his HUD.

【Hostiles eliminated or captured: 15/16.】

He read it twice. Then he read it a third time, in case the number changed.

It didn't.

Fifteen out of sixteen. Somewhere in this building, or somewhere that used to be this building, one person was still unaccounted for. The op was functionally complete as far as everyone around him was concerned. The floors were clear, the teams were reporting in, and the building was being stood down. Nobody else was looking at a panel that told them the math was wrong.

He keyed the radio before he'd fully decided what he was going to say. "Requesting a secondary sweep of all floors. I have reason to believe one hostile may still be unaccounted for. Repeat, requesting secondary sweep."

The silence that followed was the particular silence of people trying to figure out what they'd just heard.

Delta One was the first to speak. "Soren. What did you find?"

"Nothing specific," Soren said carefully. "I just think we should be thorough. It's a big building. Things get missed."

The looks he got from the rest of the team ranged from puzzled to quietly irritated. Delta Five made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Outstanding. Delta Two gets to carry the shield up another fifteen floors because Soren has a feeling."

Delta Two picked up the ballistic shield without a word. His expression didn't change. That, somehow, made it worse.

The tactical commander's response came back over the radio thirty seconds later: secondary sweep authorized, teams to rotate through floors already cleared. Delta One acknowledged, clicked off, and looked at Soren for a long moment with the evaluating patience of a man deciding whether to ask again or let it go.

He let it go. "You heard the order. Nobody leaves a corner unchecked."

They went back up.

Soren followed at the rear of the stack and kept his thoughts to himself. The team's irritation was a background noise he could afford to ignore. What he couldn't afford to ignore was the question that had been forming in the back of his mind since he'd seen the number on the HUD, the question that was now fully assembled and waiting for him to look at it directly.

Sixteen hostiles. A crew of professional smugglers who had been running from law enforcement since before they'd entered the building. Every floor had been swept by experienced operators. Every room had been checked. The stairwells had been covered from both ends. There was no corner of this building where a man with a g*n could have stayed hidden through all of that.

Unless the man didn't have a g*n.

Soren moved to the window at the end of the corridor and looked down at the street below. The perimeter was still active, patrol units maintaining their positions, and among the activity at the base of the building, the hostages were being brought out one by one, handed off to paramedics, guided to waiting vehicles. Some were walking. Some were being carried. Some were already in ambulances with the doors closed.

The system notification arrived while he was still watching.

【Ringleader has escaped. Mission failed.】

The light went out.

________________________________________

"Move it, Soren. Don't just stand there!"

He was in the parking bay. The armored police vehicles sat idling in a row. Delta One was in the passenger seat with his arm out the window, and the morning air smelled of exhaust and dry pavement, and everything was exactly as it had been at the beginning of the first run and the beginning of the second.

Soren stood still for a moment with his eyes closed.

The headache was worse. Not dramatically worse, not the kind of pain that made it hard to function, but measurably worse than it had been after the first reset, a pressure behind his eyes that hadn't been there before and wasn't going away. Two resets, two increments of cost. The pattern was clear enough that he didn't need a third data point to understand it.

He had a finite number of chances. He didn't know how many. He knew the number was going down.

"Damn it," he said quietly, and walked to the vehicle.

He climbed in, settled into his seat, and did not wait for Delta One to comment on his expression. "I know," he said. "I'm fine. I zoned out."

Delta One studied him for a moment, then turned back to the front.

Soren stared at the headrest in front of him and ran through what he knew. The ringleader had escaped by hiding among the hostages. Not a fighter, or at least not presenting as one. Someone who had understood, early enough to act on it, that the safest place in a building full of armed officers was in a group of unarmed civilians being escorted out. The background checks would have caught him eventually, but eventually wasn't fast enough if he was already in an ambulance with the doors closed.

The building sweep hadn't missed him. He'd never been in the building to find.

Soren leaned forward. "Hey. Question."

Delta One glanced back. "What?"

"The hostages. After they're brought out, who runs their IDs? And how long does that take?"

"Detectives handle it. Could be an hour, could be longer, depending on how many there are." Delta One's eyes narrowed slightly. "Why?"

"What if someone in that group isn't actually a hostage?"

The question landed in the cabin with the particular weight of something that everyone immediately understood and nobody immediately wanted to deal with. Delta Five stopped adjusting his gear. Delta Six looked up. Delta Three said nothing, which from him meant he was thinking about it.

"It's possible," Delta One said slowly. "Situation like this, it's chaotic enough. But anyone coming out of that building gets screened before they're released."

"What if they're injured? What if they go out in an ambulance before the screening happens?"

"Then they get checked at the hospital." Delta One paused. "Eventually."

"Right," Soren said. "Eventually."

Delta Two spoke from the far side of the cabin, voice unhurried. "We could ask the perimeter units to hold everyone on scene until IDs are confirmed. No one leaves, ambulance or otherwise, until they're cleared."

"That's not our call," Delta Three said. "We clear the building. Someone else handles the civilians. That's how it works, and for good reason. We start making calls about who gets medical attention and when, that's a different kind of problem."

He wasn't wrong, and Soren knew it. The division of responsibility existed for reasons that made sense in every scenario except this one. The team's job was the building. The hostages were someone else's jurisdiction the moment they crossed the perimeter. And arguing the point in the back of an armored police vehicle two minutes before a breach was not going to change the operational structure of a multi-unit SWAT deployment.

Soren sat back and said nothing more.

He'd planted the question. He didn't know yet whether it would be enough. But the answer was somewhere in the operation itself, and he was going in again with one more piece of information than he'd had before. He'd have to find the opening when it came.

Whatever it took, he was not resetting a fourth time.