Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 007

Delta One's words stayed with Soren longer than the conversation itself.

If the ringleader was hiding among the hostages, he wouldn't do it clean. He'd need a reason to bypass the initial screening, a reason nobody would question in the middle of a chaotic extraction. The simplest answer was also the most effective: an injury. A man bleeding through his shirt, barely conscious, loaded onto a stretcher by paramedics who had thirty other people to deal with, was not a man anyone was going to pull aside for identity verification. The ambulance doors would close, and that would be the end of it.

Which meant the ringleader's exit wasn't a matter of luck. It was a plan. And it had a window.

Soren checked his watch. Four thirty-two in the afternoon. The breach had started roughly two and a half hours ago, which put the ringleader's move somewhere in the final thirty minutes of the operation, when the upper floors were still being cleared and the hostage evacuation was already underway below. On the previous run, Delta Team had been working the eighth and ninth floors around that time. That narrowed the search considerably.

"Can I take another look at the floor plan?" he asked, keeping his voice casual.

Delta One glanced back. "We went over it in the briefing."

"I know. Just want to refresh my memory on the upper floors."

A pause, the brief weighing pause of a man with more questions than he was choosing to ask. Then Delta One reached into the document sleeve beside his seat and passed a folded set of floor plans back without comment.

Soren spread them across his knees. The hotel had been built in 1976, the kind of construction that had started with ambitions it never quite fulfilled. The lower floors were wide, built to house restaurants, a fitness room, a small retail space. The upper floors narrowed as they rose, fewer rooms per level, better views. Most of the lower amenities had been shuttered for years. If the ringleader had been filtering down with the flow of evacuating hostages, he'd have needed to be somewhere between the eighth and eleventh floors when the extraction began, close enough to blend in, far enough up that the early waves hadn't reached him yet.

The floor plan confirmed what he needed to know. He folded it and handed it back.

The vehicle stopped. The doors came open, and Soren stepped out into the familiar dry heat of the perimeter with the familiar weight of the AR-15 carbine in his hands. The CIA supervisor was at his usual position near the command post, still working through his repertoire of outrage. Soren had heard the performance twice already. It barely registered now.

The breach order came. Delta Team formed up and moved.

This time, Soren didn't use the flashbang.

He'd used it on the second run and watched three hostages die for it. The hidden shooter behind the vase was a problem he could solve without collateral damage, now that he knew exactly where the man was and exactly how long he had. Police CQB Tactics LV2 had sharpened his timing considerably, and he intended to use every bit of it.

Three. Two. One.

The door came down. Delta Two went through. Soren was half a step behind him, muzzle already swinging left, and put two rounds through the vase before the debris finished moving. The man behind it never got the AKM raised. Soren pivoted and dropped the hostile moving toward the stairwell with a controlled burst before he reached cover. Two down in under four seconds, both weapons kicked clear, both targets confirmed. He moved left immediately, opening his angle, creating space for Delta Five to enter and cover the right side. The remaining three hostiles were caught in converging fire from both breach points as Bravo Team came through the right entrance simultaneously. Six seconds from breach to clear. Every hostage in the right corner untouched.

"Push forward!"

Delta Team didn't linger. They hit the stairwell at a run.

The third floor went faster than it had any right to. Soren took the bathroom door on the second room without hesitation, and the large man who had grabbed his suppressor on the previous run found himself yanked off-balance before he'd finished forming the intention, two rounds center mass and one to the head before he hit the tile. Delta Three was still processing the sound of the shots when Soren stepped back into the corridor and signaled forward.

Floor by floor, the building fell. The rhythm of it was different this time, cleaner, the gaps and hesitations of the earlier runs smoothed out by repetition and the quiet confidence of a man who already knew what was behind every door. He wasn't reckless. He simply moved with the certainty of someone who had already paid for the information he was using.

By the time they reached the eleventh floor, the clock in Soren's head told him he was ahead of schedule.

"Keep going," he said to Delta Three and Delta Six at the corridor junction. "I'll take this one."

Delta Five had already stopped beside him, reading the situation without being told. He watched the other two continue up the stairwell, then turned to Soren with a look that asked the question without words.

Soren pointed at the wall separating them from the target room and made the shape of a g*n with his fingers.

Delta Five held the look for a moment, then nodded once. He didn't ask how Soren knew. In the field, with a teammate who had been right about everything else today, that question could wait.

They moved to the adjacent room, already cleared. Delta Five tied off the safety line while Soren checked his Glock 17 and chambered a fresh round. Then Soren climbed out the window.

The ledge was narrow, the drop substantial, and the wind at this height had a quality that made the word "brisk" feel inadequate. He pressed his back against the facade, let out a slow breath, and moved laterally toward the target room one careful step at a time, the safety line taut behind him.

The target room's window was open. The curtains were drawn, but the glass had been left up, which meant the people inside hadn't been disturbed yet. He heard them before he reached the frame.

A woman's voice, low and controlled, the voice of someone used to being listened to. "They're already on this floor. I can hear them working the doors. It won't be long."

A man's voice, younger, rougher. "So we fight?"

"With what? You've got one pistol against a full tactical team with automatic weapons and body armor?"

A pause. "Then what do we do?"

"When they come," the woman said, "you're going to..."

Soren had heard enough. He unclipped the fragmentation grenade from his vest, pulled the pin, and tossed it through the gap in the curtain with the unhurried ease of someone disposing of something unpleasant. Then he pulled back against the wall.

The detonation was loud and definitive, the kind of sound that ended conversations permanently.

He climbed back through the adjacent window to find Delta Five staring at him with an expression that occupied the exact midpoint between impressed and deeply unsettled.

"You want to explain any of that?"

"Not really," Soren said, and reattached his rifle sling.

________________________________________

Half an hour later, the HUD notification arrived quietly at the edge of his vision.

【Congratulations. Your Rookie Career Instance has been completed. Mission settlement is now in progress. You may exit the instance at any time within the next hour.】

Soren leaned against the side of the armored police vehicle and looked out at the scene in front of him. The perimeter was standing down, patrol units pulling back, the controlled urgency of the operation giving way to the slower work of aftermath. Twenty-seven hostages gathered near the medical staging area, every one accounted for. Six members of Delta Team, all present and uninjured. Sixteen hostiles, all eliminated.

Every box checked. Every achievement completed.

He let out a long breath and felt something release in his chest that he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Bar. Tonight. Mission bonus. Anyone who skips is an i***t," Delta Five announced, dropping into the back seat and stretching out across it, AR-15 carbine resting on his chest like a man who had fully earned the right to be horizontal.

"Move your legs," Delta Three said, dropping the breaching ram into the vehicle with a thud that made Delta Six flinch, then climbing in after it.

Delta Six got in quietly and sat with his hands on his knees, saying nothing. Delta Two loaded the ballistic shield into the back, settled into the driver's seat, and started the engine.

Delta One came back from the command post wearing the expression of a man who had just lost a negotiation. "Cheap," he muttered, dropping into the passenger seat. He looked at Soren, still standing by the door. "Get in. It's not much, but tonight's covered."

Soren looked at him for a moment, then at the rest of the team through the windows. A few hours, measured in any conventional sense. A few hours in a borrowed body, in a world that wasn't his, running an operation he'd had to die twice to understand. But he was leaving with Police CQB Tactics LV2, a cleaner trigger pull, and something harder to name: the particular knowledge of how a team moved when it trusted itself.

He'd carry all of it back.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "But everything ends eventually."

He gave the car door a single knock, the way you might say goodbye to something that couldn't hear you.

System. Return.