Operation Honshu Wolf Read Online Free Page B

meeting room, at the far end of the table from the decision makers.
    Over there, talking to Gray and Harris? There was the woman he’d heard about locust armadillos from, back when they were only ruining a couple of plantations. The woman that had, over a stretch of years, fed Miller every detail imaginable from the species of civet that shat the best coffee in Indonesia straight through to the exact difference between espresso , restritto , and lungo .
    Jennifer Barrett.
    Barrett wasn’t just the company’s top coffee maven. She was Schaeffer-Yeager’s head of internal IT, and a delight to work close protection for. She understood that the weakest link in any chain of security were the people in it, and the sharkish, middle-aged woman didn’t complain too hard when one of her bodyguards got her the wrong drink instead of letting her traipse through unsecured coffee shops. But even though she was understanding about security, anything else that rubbed her the wrong way was at risk of getting its throat ripped out.
    Right now, her teeth were bared at Robert Harris, head of security and all around nice guy. You had to be a nice guy, didn’t you, to call down a helicopter gunship on an unarmed crowd?
    “It was necessary to preserve the life of one of our assets,” Harris growled. “We had nothing else in the area and those freaks would have torn open the limousine if we’d waited any longer.”
    “Tear gas, stun grenades, painbeams, water cannons; there is riot control gear on the books ,” Barrett screeched, stabbing her finger onto the files displayed on a tablet in front of her. “There is such a thing as proportionality, Bob! ”
    “Proportionality? By the time the chopper arrived the howling mob was three blocks wide. Tens of goddamn thousands! ” He thrust out his stubbled chin. Generally, he looked lean. Right now, despite having more than enough to eat, he looked starved and desperate. “I don’t have a riot squad that can contain that, nobody does anymore! The non-lethal option wasn’t an option.”
    In theory, Miller took orders from Harris. In practice, despite Miller heading Cobalt-2, his direct superior was head of Cobalt-1, Brandon Lewis. Harris may have dished out the orders, but he didn’t know much about Cobalt’s special-case personnel security role.
    Lewis picked up his coffee after several moments listening to the big-wigs wig out at the far end of the board table, and shot a look at Miller. He put the coffee down without sipping any, rolled up his pantleg, and scratched at the stumps of his legs, the scars shockingly pink compared to the black skin of his thigh and hands. Lewis had been a marine, back in the Middle Eastern wars of the ’10s, and gotten his legs taken off by an IED. After he’d gotten a decent set of prosthetics and learned to work on them, he’d gone right back on duty. Now in his sixties, his current prosthetics were about the best unpowered models available, springs and tensile cables providing a more than adequate replacement for his missing knees. But when Lewis got nervous, his stumps itched.
    Miller slid in beside Lewis, and gingerly tried the half-and-half bastard coffee. He winced, and immediately regretted it.
    “Bad?” Lewis asked, voice barely a whisper.
    “Like somebody else drank it first, then pissed it through a burnt sneaker.” Miller took a second sip anyway. He’d acclimatize to it soon enough.
    Lewis glared down at his mug, steeled himself, and sipped. He immediately grimaced. “Had worse.” Wiping at his mouth, he set the mug down. “Not for thirty years, but I’ve had worse.”
    “Trouble in paradise?” Miller asked quietly, glancing up the table.
    “The President’s trying to backpedal on his support for us. Bob Harris made the call on the helicopter, his balls are on the chopping block.”
    When the famine started running out of control, the company had relied heavily on having the President’s ear. Sure, the Infected rioting and