I'm Not Special, I'm Just Unlucky

Chapter 11 - Drawing Boundaries

Ice Cube as Captain Richard Howard

"You asshole! What were you thinking?! You could've blown our cover!" Blake shouted at the top of his lungs.

"Hey quiet down," Duke joked, "Samantha's driving."

Blake shot him a death glare and the jokester quickly simmered down. Uh oh, Duke actually listened to our techie. "You could've gotten killed out there! You could've gotten us killed!" Blake continued shouting.

Unfortunately, his words didn't quite dig into me. It had been twenty minutes and the shock had not receded an inch. There was nothing else more demanding on my mind right now than to make sense of what I saw.

"... were you frozen? What were you looking at?!"

I gulped and snapped back to reality. Everyone was silent, even Duke. They couldn't know about this. "The Sicarii." I confirmed partially to throw everyone off my tail.

Samantha pulled over and looked back in confusion. Everyone looked at me bewildered. Blake expression turned from rage to disbelief, "What?"

"I saw Damien Vikrum in there." I said nodded to Shen for proof. He nodded back.

"Yeah, Shen told us that." Blake responded.

"But Vikrum's boys. Their forearm was tattooed with a dagger and the word Sicarii. We just found our lead. The FBI most wanted is the leader of our targeted group." It took a moment for everyone to process this critical piece of information.

Victoria took charge, "Shen, you said something about 'giving the senator a surprise'? Given their arsenal of weapons back at the church, they've got to be using those. We must inform HQ about this. As for the nuke, we have to take it from them. We don't know what they'll be using it for but if it's in the Sicarii's hands, no one is safe. Gear up!"

"Now?" Shen asked. The tone in which the question was asked forecasted an argument on the horizon.

Victoria nodded with confidence in response but Shen shook his head, "Now's a good idea. The church is like a fortress right now. There's too many people guarding it not to mention the cargos of weapons."

"We can't waste any time." Victoria rebutted, "They have a nuclear weapon in their hands! We're risking hundreds of thousands of lives if we don't take action right now."

"If we rush in now, I doubt any of us would make it out alive." Shen said solemnly, "We don't have enough guns or enough people. It's best to contact the Enterprise for this and follow their instructions."

"We were trained to accomplish the task whether we'd make it out alive or not. It better for us to be sacrificed than the innocent ones that would in a city."

"Our task is to find out why they targeted the government officials. Everything else is secondary!"

"You think the millions of lives out there is secondary? Anything related to this mission is a priority Zhang!"

"Think this through Victoria!" Shen said with burning anger in his eyes; Victoria glared back with the same intensity. Everyone else stayed quiet. "If they just received the nuke, what are the chances they would be using it in the next few hours? Of all the targets we've ever encountered, those with the capability of leveling out small cities with explosives don't carry out their actions at the immediate purchase of their weapons. I'm sure Eva can tell you all about it." Shen looked at our analyst.

Eva gulped and stuttered, "W-Well, it's a psychological effect. The risk in which the situation may go awry and the magnitude of the destruction these criminals are capable of creating is on a scale so large that their actions may be delayed. Not only that, the subconsciousness is in denial that they are about to commit this large of a crime resulting in self-doubt and extra precautions. If the Sicarii are like the targets we've dealt with before, they'll follow this train of thought making the chance of the immediate use of the nuke in the lower percentile."