Read Online Project StrikeForce by Kevin Lee Swaim - Free Book Online

It’s the
unknown unknowns. That’s why we exist, to prevent these from spiraling out of
control.”
    Deion was pushing to keep up with Eric’s long
stride. They moved quickly through the base, finally stopping in front of a
large door guarded by an armed MP.
    Eric pressed his palm to a reader buried in the
wall and the door opened. He showed his badge to the MP who studied it, then
motioned him through the door. They entered a small room with a wall of glass,
another MP ensconced behind it. The door shut behind them. They stood there for
several moments until the guard behind the glass spoke. “Name?”
    “Eric Wise, escorting Deion Freeman.”
    The guard watched them intently, then keyed a
button and the far door opened.
    “This is one hell of a man trap,” Deion said.
    “You’ve no idea,” Eric said. “If something’s not
right, we’d be locked in until an armed squad showed up. The glass is bullet
proof. Not bullet resistant, but bullet proof. Not even a 50 cal would
penetrate it. The doors and walls could stop a suicide bomber. If the guard
thinks I’m being coerced, he can evacuate the air in the chamber, rendering us
unconscious. The guards will then shoot first and ask questions later.”
    “What the hell?”
    Eric motioned him through the door. “You’ll
understand in a minute.”
    They stepped through the door into a massive room
with stepped flooring. The far wall contained row after row of monitors. Dozens
of people sat at workstations, hunched over their keyboards. A tall man stood
to the side, the officer on duty, who nodded at Eric and barked, “Commander on
deck.”
    Eric nodded back, then turned to Deion and spread
his arms. “Welcome to the War Room.”
    Deion stared. “Holy shit.”
    “Holy shit,” Eric agreed. “More information flows
through this room than any other place on earth. The people here monitor every
piece of information in the world. Everything the CIA knows, we know. The NSA.
The Pentagon. We have network taps in all the big telecoms, and they stream the
data to us. But, it’s more than just the data. We process it all and look for
the patterns, the thing that can’t be seen. When we find it, we act.”
    Deion was speechless. He looked from one giant
monitor to another. One displayed a data-stream from a satellite over the
Koreas, another a topographical map of Iran, red boxes on the map in a constant
flux of motion. Phone numbers scrolled by on another, faster than the eye could
see.
    In fact, everywhere he looked he saw an
overwhelming amount of information. He tried to focus on just one screen, a
graph of electronic gaming equipment being purchased through phony accounts and
shipped to Syria, but trying to keep up with the flickering text made him
lightheaded. He gave up and turned back to Eric. “This is what you do here? How
could anybody make sense of this?”
    Eric grinned. “Beats the hell out of me. But here,
in this room, we protect the United States. Here we protect the world.”
    Later, after Eric had shown him his quarters, they
sat at the small table in the kitchenette.
    Deion shook his head in disbelief. “Get the fuck
out. Truman?”
    “Scouts honor,” Eric said. “They created the OTM
back in the fifties. Been doing it ever since.”
    Deion let it sink in. He would call bullshit on
just about anybody, but Eric was one of the squarest shooters he had ever met.
    He remembered asking a Delta operator called
IronMan, a wiry little man from Cleveland, about how Eric got the call-sign
Steeljaw. IronMan just smiled. “Wise doesn’t shoot the shit or fuck around with
the rest of the guys. When your ass is in the fire, he’s the guy you want. He’s
a stone cold motherfucking killer. I’ve seen him hold a kid, pat him on the
head while we led the kid’s old man outside and threw him in a truck. When we
got outside the village, he blew the old man’s brains out. Then he wrapped the
body up in white cloth and dug the hole himself, then buried the old