“Eyes to Bear, Crash is getting twitchy here,” the call came in through my earpiece. “What’s your ETA? Over.” I responded with two short bursts of static followed by eight long bursts, signifying the twenty seconds I needed. “Will confirm in thirty,” Eyes said.

Our sniper, X-Ray, was already in position, so it left the four grunts to get to our positions near the doors. The other three were positioned at a ninety-degree angle to the front door. I made it to my position and sent one long and three short across the mics.

Eyes had waited another ten seconds as promised before he rotated through confirmations.

“Confirm position, X-Ray.” There came four bursts of static: a long, two shorts, and another long.

“Confirm position, Andy.” Short. Long.

“Confirm position, Chewy.” Long. Short. Long. Short.

“Confirm position, Yankee.” Long. Short. Long. Long.

“Confirm position, Bear.” Long. Short. Short. Short.

“Positions confirmed. X-Ray is a go.”

There was a pause of ten seconds before I heard X-Ray’s slightly accented command. “Go.”

The hacienda was two stories, its roof topped with clay tiles. The front door was decorative instead of sturdy, the wood set with a single pane of glass, which allowed me to see directly into the house. To the right of the door was a sitting room, which had one person on guard in the evening. I could see the couch in the sitting room, and it was empty, which meant the guard would be seated in the armchair, which had been confirmed via thermal imaging, not ten minutes earlier. Still, it was good to know nothing had changed since then.

I sprinted to the front door. My MP5 came up, and I fired a round through the glass pane and barreled through. I emptied three rounds into the man sitting in the La-Z-Boy before he could reach for the handgun on the side table. It was the noisiest entry I had made in almost five years of black ops, unlike my days in the Special Forces breaching insurgent houses in Afghanistan.

I walked past the unfortunate guard to the base of the stairs positioned behind him, angling back up into the house. I noted the television on one wall playing a Spanish soap opera. The outside wall had a fireplace with nude artwork over the mantle – if you call something like that artwork. I pulled the shaped charge from my belt, detonator already in place, and slapped it onto the exterior wall at the base of the stairs. Then I got the hell out of the room.

I heard footsteps upstairs. The pounding of bare feet against hardwood floors began down the stairs, and I knew I’d judged the timing correctly. Pulling the remote from another vest pocket, I stepped through the empty door and to the side. Once the sturdy wall was between myself and the explosive in the other room, I pulled the trigger.

Once the house stopped shaking, I circled the house to the North, where I knew the rest of my team would be waiting. I finally had a chance to see the results of my handiwork when I rounded the edge of the house. The north side of the building had collapsed, blowing out the structure of the floor above it and collapsing the bedroom above it onto the main floor. I caught the shapes of dark figures moving into the debris.

“I have eyes on the target,” Yankee said in his Texas drawl.

“Lullaby,” X-Ray said, and I heard the distinctive click of a tranquilizer round fired from a low-powered rifle a few blocks away.

“We have the target and are proceeding to the extraction point,” Chewy’s voice said through my earpiece. I saw the forms of Yankee and Chewy move out of the house, a figure held between them.

“Good work,” Eyes said. “Resume radio silence.”

We worked our way toward the extraction point, Andy in the lead and me in the rear, covering our exit. The destination was only four blocks away, but we had to navigate the cluttered back alleys of Matamoros in the dark. We were halfway to the extraction point when my night vision goggles, went dead.

“Shit!” I heard Andy exclaim, a surprising outburst from the usually reserved ex-Catholic. I couldn’t blame him for the outburst though as everyone else seemed to experience the same thing, suddenly losing our night-time advantage.

Weighing the dangers of our now sightless trek with the comparable danger of breaking radio silence, I quietly said, “Eyes, our night vision is down. Please advise. Over.” I waited another fifteen seconds before trying again.

“Forrest, you’re not coming through on my radio.” Chewy used my real name, which meant he thought something was very wrong.

“You gotta take a look at this,” Andy said from upfront. I looked around, but couldn’t see anything, so I flipped my night vision goggles up onto my forehead. There was almost no light to see by. We had picked a moonless night for a reason, and now it was the reason we wouldn’t make it back to the rendezvous point on time.

Something about the situation didn’t sit right with me. There were always lights this close to the US border, and unlike the smaller neighboring towns, Matamoros was not a city that went dark at night.

“No lights,” Yankee said. “This ain’t good.”

“Switch on our lights and double-time it?” I asked the group.

“Do it.” After working with the man for three years, I knew Andy was a good leader in tactical situations like this one. We did not have all the information, and he had to make a decision quickly. He would never weigh hypothetical situations we could not handle. He would consider if there was anything wrong with the plan at face value. If he could find no issue with it, then we would proceed. We all had an issue with the plan. Each of us tried to turn on the tight-beam LED mounted to our helmets, but none of them would activate. I squinted at the others in the dark, but I could not make out any reactions. Next, I tried the high-powered light on my MP5. Similarly, no response. I pulled a glow stick from one of the myriad pockets on my BDU, cracked it, and began shaking it in my off-hand.

The back alley glowed from the chemical green light. I passed the stick up to Andy, and he led the way forward at a trot, or as close to a trot as we could manage with a limp body carried by two other operatives. Chewy seemed to have no issue with the weight – the black man was built like a refrigerator. Yankee was strong, but the Texan was shorter than Chewy, forcing him to support the body at an odd angle.

As we continued to the extraction point, we heard doors opening in the neighborhood and questions shouted between neighbors. My Spanish was not good, but I heard broken pieces of “what’s going on?” spoken a dozen different ways by confused citizens. Some people held lit candles, the innocent light making its way to us past the artificial green of our glow sticks. Still, we pressed on, my two comrades carrying our unconscious prisoner between us.

Several people shouted at us from their doors, but given the unrest in the city as of late, people were both unsurprised at seeing a small mob carrying a body and all too practiced at looking the other way to save their necks. It was a risk, given that people would talk about what they saw, but we were confident we could make it back to the United States border without any real interference. We made our way down the dark alley and around the corner to the waiting van. At one point, the paint had been a deep blue, but now there were patches of white bleeding through. The brown panels on the side were the same color as the van my mom used when she drove me to soccer practice. The lower part of the carriage and the wheels were covered in mud. It was, in short, an ugly-ass vehicle. With leprosy.

The side door slid open as we approached the vehicle, and I could see Eyes motioning us forward. The four of us worked to get the limp body into the van.

“X-Ray is not here yet,” Eyes said once we were all inside and the door to the van closed. Our target was tied up in the corner, bag over his head and duct tape over his mouth. The four of us grunts, plus Eyes, sat in the back of the van. Despite the outside appearance — the vehicle was even worse on the inside. The seats had been removed, leaving us to sit on the floor of the vehicle. “What happened out there?”

“No idea,” Andy said. “Everything was going according to plan. We had the target and were ten seconds ahead of schedule, from what I could tell. We were halfway down the alley when all the electronics went fubar. No night vision or flashlights. We were caught in the open with no goddamn lighting before Bear cracked a chem, and we could see well enough to move out. Whole city seemed down. We spotted civies using candles.”

“It was the same here. Communications are down. Anything electronic is dead.”

“EMP?” I said.

“Who would hit this town with an EMP?” Eyes asked. “The Pentagon could authorize it, but they know we’re here.”

“Alternatives?” I asked. I kept my words short since I was not the commander. Not only that, but we were in what was essentially enemy territory, with a hostage, and the op was going sideways.

“We find out more when we get to the border.”

Crash turned around from the driver’s seat and announced, “X-Ray is here.”

We slid the door open again, and X-Ray hopped in carrying his backpack, his rifle no doubt collapsed into the compact space. The short Asian barely had to crouch as he climbed into the van. “Well that was some shit,” X-Ray said when the door closed again. “Everything went to hell before I made it out of the building.”

“Let me guess,” Andy said. “Anything electronic no longer worked.”

“You too?” X-Ray asked, looking at each of us. We all nodded. “Shit. What are we gonna do?”

“Crash, get us back to the border,” Eyes said. Then he turned back to us. “We complete the mission and get a debrief of what’s going on.”

We heard some fiddling from the front of the vehicle before Crash turned back to the rest of us. “She won’t start.”

“What?” Eyes said.

“She won’t fuckin’ start, sir.”

“Dammit,” Eyes said. “You’re certain?”

“She was just purring this morning, cap. But nothing now. I think the battery is dead.”

“Dammit,” Eyes said again. Even our low-tech piece of junk had been knocked out. Plan, prepare, execute – this was the operations process the Army had drilled into us. But there was always a need to assess – the continuous determination of the progress toward accomplishing the mission. The mission was to retrieve the target, return stateside, and aid in the transfer of the target to the Pentagon. If retrieval was not achievable, the target was to be eliminated. Retrieval on foot from the location was not part of the mission parameters and not achievable, given the distance to the border. “Everyone out and keep your eyes sharp. Bear, do it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and waited next to the man with the bag over his head. When everyone was out, I drew the combat knife at my belt. “I will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” I pulled back the suit jacket from the man’s left side and slid the blade into the gap under the man’s ribs and up into his heart. “I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” The body moved for the first time since I’d seen him as the man shuddered, then went still. I pulled the knife out and waited. “I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office.” My left hand went to the man’s throat, feeling for a pulse under the bag. I waited for ten seconds where the pulse should be on the man’s neck before I knew it was over. “So help me God.” I wiped my weapon on the man’s pants leg, then finished the cleaning with a wet cloth, removing the blood from the knife first, then from my bloody right hand.

“There was no way we could get him out,” Eyes said from the door of the van. He couldn’t see me in the darkness, but I guess he didn’t need to. I’d been under his command on this team for four years now. This coming Thanksgiving, only two months away now, would start my fifth year.

“I know,” I said, and made my way to the door of the van and hopped out.

“Let’s get home,” the captain said.

“Hell yes, sir.”