West Potomac Park Sector
0935 EST


Gregory looked over the radio equipment as the civilian militia team patrolled the perimeter. "This is sloppy. I mean, it works, but it's just so slap dash."

"Can it be cleaned up, made to work for us?" asked Ryckmen.

"Could, but there's not much point to it." Gregory sighed as he turned to the team. "Don't get me wrong, taking this site away from the Outcasts was definitely worthwhile. But there's literally nothing here which we don't already have better equipment in place for. If we had somebody down around the Pentagon or the airport, I suppose it would be a useful secondary repeater, but ViewPoint's already giving us plenty of local communications coverage. Even out that far."

Ryckmen shrugged. "Like you say, getting it out of Outcast hands is a win, and not merely a symbolic one."

"True enough," said Tarvey as he looked around. "And not to be too bloodthirsty, but there's enough in the way of structures here to make a decent little outpost for the Campus. Could serve as a forward base for this part of town, give us a place to rest and rearm if the Outcasts decide to get frisky."

"Frisky how, Ricky?" Bundmeister asked.

"Since we've pretty much ruined the Events Center as a beach head, and since we captured Lloyd, we don't know what they might be thinking as far as their next strategic move. But if I were suddenly promoted to planning strategy for the Outcasts, I'd want to make sure I had at least one other avenue to get into the city besides the Roosevelt Bridge. If they still have small craft available to them, Tidal Basin would be a good landing point to insert strike teams." Tarvey shrugged and smiled. "It's where I'd go if I wanted to hit the city from the river."

"Peacemaker, this is Casablanca, come back."

Ryckmen tapped his watch. "Casablanca, this is Peacemaker. Lobo here. What's going on, Manny?"

"We've been picking up some True Sons chatter. Apparently, we didn't move on Jefferson Plaza quite as fast as we thought." The team looked at each other, expressions hardening. "They seem to have built a stockpile underneath the Lincoln Memorial, and the chatter is indicating they may be preparing to relocate some of those shells back to the Capitol."

"Which means they have more 120mm mortars, and they're likely emplaced at the Capitol," growled Ryckmen. "I suppose it was a pipe dream to think we'd gotten them all."

"Easy, Lobo," said Gregory. "Yeah, they have a stockpile, but that's all the shells they have. We take out the stockpile, we keep them from ever using those things."

Nodding, Ryckmen took a deep breath. "We're not too far from the Memorial right now. Do you have any indication of how far along they are?"

"Preparatory orders from Ridgeway, so probably not very far at all. They've got a Major Ashford there to supervise transportation. He's one of Ridgeway's inner circle, so a worthwhile target just on his own. There's another major there, guy named Keates, he's responsible for holding the Memorial itself. Also a worthwhile target."

"How worthwhile are we talking, Manny?" asked Bundmeister.

"Both of them were directly involved in busting Ridgeway out after his arrest. Keates got a promotion out of it. But I don't think Ridgeway cares for him as much as he does Ashford. It's Ashford who got the job of moving the shells. That tells me Ridgeway trusts him to use his head for something other than a helmet rack."

"While Keates gets a job commensurate with his talents without realizing Ridgeway doesn't trust him that far," concluded Ryckmen. "If we had more time, I'd try to play the two off each other. But we can't afford to screw around. Particularly if the idiot major has more immediate access to the shells. We're rolling in ten, Manny. Peacemaker, out."

* * *

Lincoln Memorial, West Potomac Park Sector
1007 EST


Ryckmen and Tarvey moved liked shadows, staying low when necessary, using the corners of shipping containers to conceal themselves when they needed to be upright. Once in position, they coached Bundmeister and Gregory inside the perimeter.

"Think we've got the transport column here," subvocalized Ryckmen. "Lots of strong backs, not a lot of heavy weapons."

Tarvey waited for an opportune moment, then sidearmed the sensor ball into an out of the way corner. "Not seeing any shells around," he murmured, his AR enhanced shooting glasses showing blotchy outlines of figures and objects. "Stockpile must be kept somewhere out of the way. Probably down in the maintenance tunnels under the Memorial."

"Eyes on Ashford. Forget about easily decapitating the command structure. He's got a blast suit on."

"Guess we do this the hard way," grumbled Gregory. "Call the shot, Lobo."

"Light'em up."

Gregory opened up with his M249, raking a knot of True Sons and shredding the plastic barrels they'd been sawing in half lengthwise. More True Sons advanced, only to be picked off by Tarvey and Ryckmen. Bundmeister kept off to one side of Gregory, using her AK to finish off any leakers. Only Ashford remained. Much like the late and unlamented Sergeant Quiroz, Ashford carried a grenade launcher. Unlike the dead NCO, however, he didn't seem to be quite as adept at its use. The True Sons officer popped off the entire drum of grenades, not even coming close to hitting his intended targets. Bundmeister took advantage of the dust and smoke to move in behind Ashford, punching 12 gauge slugs into the ammo carrier on the back of the EOD suit. With a muffled scream, Ashford fell over face first. Bundmeister kicked the grenade launcher away, then rolled Ashford on to his back and removed his helmet.

"I can't move my legs!" Ashford shrieked. "Why can't I feel my legs? What the hell did you do to me?!"

Bundmeister stared down at Ashford, a moment of contemplation flashing through her mind. A more merciful person would have at least given Ashford something for the pain he could feel. A more callous one would have dug a heel in to make it worse. But both were contraindicated. She waited until the others came over, then looked over at Ryckmen. His eyes were absolutely pitiless as he gazed at the fallen soldier. "Lowell?" she asked quietly.

Shaking his head faintly, Ryckmen drew his sidearm and put a round through Ashford's head, killing him instantly. There would be no taunting, no attempts to extract information, no torture. Ryckmen had sworn on the lives of the murdered Castle residents that only death awaited any True Sons fighter that came into range of him, and he would keep that oath, one bullet and one body at a time.

"Think these boys got the word out to Keates and his crew?" asked Tarvey as they headed inside.

"I sincerely hope so," replied Ryckmen grimly. "I want them spending their last moments living in abject terror. I want their only silver lining to be that one of you three kills them before I do."

"Getting a little lean on feelings, aren't you, Lowell?" Gregory asked quietly. As much as he shared Ryckmen's implacability towards the True Sons, there was a dangerous coldness coming from the marksman. An aura of amorality, completely unconcerned with pettifogging notions of right or wrong.

Ryckmen said nothing as he led them down into a museum underneath the Memorial, his MDR socketed to his shoulder, sweeping with all the precision of a metronome for targets. He was aware of the presence of his teammates behind him, yet his awareness was oddly distant, a sort of sensory tunnel vision. The moment any True Sons fighter came into view, time slowed to a crawl just long enough for him to shoot the target dead before its normal flow resumed. Boxes, walls, stairs, all seemed indistinct to his eyes. The voices of his comrades sounded faint and watery. Everything outside of his sight picture might not as well have existed.

Behind Ryckmen, the rest of the team watched the sides, half afraid somebody would be popping out to shoot Ryckmen in the head as he passed before they could get a bead on them. There'd always been a touch of the preternatural to Ryckmen, a feeling that he'd built himself into something extraordinary over long years of hard living and harder fighting. But beneath it all, there had been the hidden core of a poet, a man who shaped word and deed and feeling into something which helped make sense of a world seemingly gone mad. Now, the poet was silent. Only the warrior remained, a human-shaped drone that moved and shot and killed without pause or contemplation. The only warmth to be found around him rose from the barrel of his rifle, and that only fleetingly.

Coming down into a kill house the True Sons had set up, Gregory could only watch as Ryckmen cut his way through, ejecting a magazine and slapping in a fresh one without pausing as he stalked across the floor, True Sons popping up and falling over like cardboard cutouts. Bundmeister and Tarvey were certainly doing their part, keeping the flanks cleared with sharp bursts from their respective weapons, but their efforts looked almost amateurish compared to the hyper-focused violence Ryckmen was dishing out.

The MDR ran out of ammunition within moments of the team reaching what appeared to be the nerve center of the True Sons' depot. Ryckmen barely paused, shouldering the battle rifle and drawing his sidearm, .45 ACP shells striking the metal catwalk melodiously as the suppressed pistol's action cycled almost without pause. With the True Sons cleared out, Ryckmen actually stopped for a moment, looking around to see where they needed to go next. His eyes lit on a hardened laptop on one corner of a desk. "Gregory, you're up," he said in a flat, uninflected tone.

Scowling for a moment, Gregory moved over to the laptop and checked the command trees. "Stupid bastards," he muttered. "You're going to actually put computer controls on your storage doors instead of manual or hydraulics? With us running around?" He entered a series of commands, sealing the doors of the side tunnel the True Sons had chosen to store the chemical shells in. A camera inside the tunnel showed two True Sons fighters rushing towards the door, pounding on it futilely. Gregory wasn't terribly sympathetic to their sudden plight. If the situation grew too intolerable, they had their sidearms with them.

A PA speaker crackled to life. "I know you're in here, you Division pukes. You think you've stopped us? Screw you! You've trapped yourself in here with us! And you're not leaving this place alive."

"Guessing that's Keates," said Tarvey dryly. "I'm beginning to see why Ridgeway parked him out here. If brains were C4, he couldn't blow his own nose."

"Let's do an ammo check," Bundmeister said. "I'm down two mags on my AK, five rounds from the shotgun. Ricky?"

"Two mags down on my H&K here, but otherwise good. Peace, how're you fixed?"

"Down one belt, otherwise full up." Gregory looked over at Ryckmen. "Lowell, maybe you want to hang back, keep us covered with the 700."

"Sounds good," Ryckmen said distantly. The rest of the team shared a "what the hell" glance and moved through the doors leading out of the command center. They were at the very bottom of the Memorial's undercroft, the lights of the museum gallery faintly bouncing off the brickwork high above them. A knot of True Sons stood next to a column fifty meters or so away from Ryckmen's position behind a stack of crates. Gregory moved forward, balancing the M249 on a concrete block, with Bundmeister and Tarvey moving over to his left. Ryckmen caressed the trigger, sending a round clean through one of the fighters' heads.

Squads of True Sons began to converge on their position. Some fell to Gregory, a few to Tarvey and Bundmeister, but Ryckmen outshot them all. His fingers reloaded the internal box magazine quickly and surely, the result of thousands of hours of practice and experience. He shifted from one target to the next almost mechanically, his aim rock steady as he sent round after round into each fighter that came into his crosshairs. The appearance of Keates in an EOD blast suit didn't even faze him. High velocity rifle rounds smashed into the Lexan faceplate again, and again, and again until it shattered under the assault. Shards of polycarbonate disfigured Keates' face even as the bullet carried through into his head and was caught by the interior of the blast suit's heavily padded helmet.

The elevator ride back up to the surface was absolutely silent. Gregory reported the stockpile had been sealed away, much to Ortega's delight. Henry Hayes sent them a message, thanking them for keeping the Campus from the same fate as the Castle. Ryckmen heard none of it.

* * *

The White House
1729 EST


Ellis stood on top of the helipad, looking down at the JTF troops and Division agents who'd managed to arrive. There were a few other teams of agents besides Peacemaker, but none of them had quite the same notoriety. Behind him stood Ortega on one side. He cleared his throat and smiled at the crowd.

"Just a few moments ago," he began, "the final elements of the SHD network were restored nationwide. For Division agents still struggling to hold this country together, and all of you fighting alongside them or laboring day and night to support them from here, this is the turning point. Where desperate hope becomes bold conviction. You have already overcome impossible odds. Thanks to you, good people in this city are starting to feel safe again. And our enemies are running scared. I say it's time we kick them out of their castles. To make it clear to those who stand with us, and those who would stand againt us, that we will not hesitate. We will not compromise. We will never surrender. We will bear any sacrifice and secure victory at any cost." Ellis' voice never rose, never grew to a shout, yet the crowd cheered as if hearing a battle cry. "We still have a lot of work to do, ladies and gentlemen, but I am confident of our inevitable victory. Thank you. Carry on."

The crowd dispersed, leaving only Team Peacemaker standing off to one side. Kelso noticed the way three of them looked at each other, sharing a sense of not quite disappointment. But the fourth had a thousand yard stare which chilled her blood. She went over to Gregory. "Nice speech, wouldn't you say?" The arctic, narrow eyed stare she received from Gregory was highly unexpected.

"I'm not a big speech guy," he said coldly. He looked over at Ryckmen, his expression thawing considerably. "You want to grab some chow, Lowell? Heard the kitchen brought in an eight point buck earlier, and they've been making up some slow cooked venison barbecue."

"No," said Ryckmen with quiet finality. "I'm heading over to the Theater. I'll get with Odessa, take a look at her latest force appreciations, start doping out how to take the Arena."

"We could go with you," Bundmeister said with quiet insistence, her tone suggesting displeasure with the idea of Ryckmen walking the streets alone, even to a nearby friendly settlement.

Ryckmen shook his head. "Bunny, if I'm so slow on the draw I can't even make it to the Theater, I damned well deserve to get shot." He picked up his backpack off the ground and shouldered it. "I'll give you guys a call as soon as I've chewed on the intel a bit." Fastening the waistbelt, Ryckmen walked out toward the southeast gate without another word.

Kelso looked at Ryckmen's departing back, then looked at the rest of the team. "What the hell's going on with you guys?" she demanded.

Tarvey shuffled his feet a little. "Lowell's been...off since the Castle. It hasn't impacted his performance in the field. If anything," he said with a grim smile, "he's only gotten better with his hands than he already was, if you can believe it."

"It's not PTSD or anything like that, Kelso," chimed in Bundmeister. "But you heard his little declaration of war. He's taking that very seriously, and when he heard about the shells under the Memorial, it just made him motivated. I've seen laser dots less focused than he was today."

"Even after coming off the line like he did?"

"It was a breather, Kelso. Not much more than that."

Gregory sighed softly. "Listen, I'm going to test out some of our fully restored capabilities. See you guys at supper." He wandered down into the server room and grabbed a terminal, then entered a series of commands. "ISAC, establish a person-to-person video conference with Agent Faye Lau, please."

"Establishing connection. Please stand by." A few moments later, the vidconference window came up on the screen, revealing a woman of distinctly Chinese extraction with close cropped black hair and a carbon fiber eyepatch over her left eye.

"Good evening, Agent Lau. I'm Paxton Gregory, a Division agent down in Washington D.C."

"You're in D.C.? Do we have you to thank for our tech goodies and comms coming back online fully?" she asked with a wry smile.

"Partially, ma'am," Gregory replied modestly. "It was a team effort all around, though. And while I'm delighted to find that the system's working like it used to, I'm afraid I'm calling for a far less technical reason. Agent Lowell Ryckmen was instrumental in our efforts to get things back up and running. I literally could not have done it without him watching my back. And now, I'm in the unenviable position of trying to watch his."

Lau shook her head slowly. "Let me guess. He's being taciturn and surly, shoots anything that moves once the bad guys show up, and has a thousand yard stare fit to terrify the Four Horsemen?" Gregory nodded in confirmation. "That's Lowell, through and through."

"He's done this before?"

"Yeah. I won't say Lowell's a sociopath, but he does a disturbingly accurate imitation of one from time to time. He might almost qualify as a natural killer. Close, but not quite there. There's still a short window of emotional escalation between threat recognition and engagement, just not big enough to be obvious to anybody who watches him. There are a few records where ISAC monitored his vitals during missions, and his heart rate spiked just once before settling down. Never got above fifty beats a minute after that."

"What puts him into that state of mind?"

Frowning in thought, Lau idly rubbed a scar running from underneath the edge of the eyepatch. "Put simply, he gives a damn. Lot of people in uniform, even people wearing the fancy watch, don't really care about things the way Lowell does. He ever tell you how he got the Silver Star?" Gregory shook his head. "Ask him sometime. The citation doesn't do the story justice. Just take it as good coin that the people in the fight alongside him are literally brothers in arms. The civilians he's tasked with protecting are the future that makes the fighting worthwhile, and he'll kill anything that threatens them as hard, fast, and ruthlessly as possible. He takes a pardonable pride in his victories, he agonizes over his defeats, and he bleeds for every life he couldn't save." Lau's frown deepened a little. "He'd probably shoot me for saying it, but I kind of think he's Aaron Keener's evil twin."

"Come again?" asked Gregory in surprise.

"Perhaps I should say he's Keener's 'good twin.' When the situation in New York just completely went into the toilet, Keener broke down. He rejected everything he'd been trained to do, abandoned everyone who couldn't or wouldn't conform to his new world view, and pretty much lost faith in everything around the mission. If Lowell had been in Keener's place, I know he wouldn't have broken the same way. He wouldn't have been happy, to be sure, but he never would have turned on the Division like Keener did. When Lowell first found intelligence that Keener had turned traitor, finding records of how Keener tortured and murdered Division agents, it was real tense in the Post Office for a few days afterwards. We knew Lowell wasn't mad at any of us, but we didn't want to do anything which might give him an excuse to vent his frustration. This job demands everything from us, Agent Gregory. Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Lowell Ryckmen mourns when one of us pays that price. And he rages like the wrath of God when one of us betrays that responsibility." A sad smile crossed Lau's face. "It's good to know he's found some friends who are willing to try and help him, even if he doesn't know how to let them."

* * *

The Theater
2042 EST


Eleanor Sawyer raised an eyebrow as her mother brought out a sleeping bag. "What's that for?"

Sawyer gave her daughter a playful grin. "Well, when a person wants to sleep outside, but doesn't want to be exposed to the elements over the course of the night, they will bring out this marvelous invention. It's called a sleeping bag. Keeps you nice and comfy while you sleep in the out of doors."

Eleanor rolled her eyes at her mother's deliberately droll tone. "Why do you have one out here?"

"I'm letting Lowell stay in my room tonight. He needs some space and not to be bothered by people till at least noon."

Flicking her eyes over towards the door to Sawyer's quarters, Eleanor pursed her lips together. "Is Lowell going to be all right? He seemed a little..."

"Scary?" supplied Sawyer. "Yeah, I suppose he was, just a little bit. But you've got nothing to worry about, baby. He won't hurt anybody inside these walls, especially you or me. He's just got to work a few things out in his own head before he gets back to the streets."