Free Dark Web (DARC Ops Book 2) by Jamie Garrett

their model and manufacture date. The real mystery was why they were being used on American soil, against Americans.
    Tansy made a quick U-turn, kicking up some dust along the road’s shoulder, before speeding away from the checkpoint. He looked back in his rearview mirror a moment later, still able to make out the distinctive militant shape of the black MRAPs. They were beyond overkill. And that was only for a checkpoint. What were they using on the real bad guys down the road?

    * * *
    A gainst his mounting annoyance , Tansy had backtracked to the junction at Crystal Springs. And as the officer kindly suggested, tried his luck with a highway that ran parallel with the previous, barricaded route. As luck would have it, the “active shooter situation” hadn’t spread across twenty miles of barren desert, and thus Tansy’s travels were so far unimpeded by additional roadblocks and MRAPs.
    He eventually pulled off the highway for a gas station, a barely standing relic in a tiny, dust-swept town.
    A ghost town, if it weren’t for all the news trucks.
    They were camped out along the single block of Main Street, their various reporters wandering from van to van with coffees and cameras in tow. It was reminiscent of a classic Washington D.C. media circus. You couldn’t drive around the District without coming across at least one per day. But this was Parsnip, Nevada, not the nation’s capital.
    He parked at the edge of town before getting out on foot to survey the scene, taking note of the various major national networks as he walked by each van. Through brief snippets of conversations, and from the competing noise of radio broadcasts, he was able to glean only one common narrative about the developing “active shooter” story—which was that no one knew what the hell was going on.
    Tansy tried asking a local, the elderly gentleman sitting in a chair behind the counter at the gas station. Because elderly gentlemen in small towns always knew what the hell was going on.
    “Heck if I know,” was his whistly-voiced response. He was probably just happy to sell so much gas and shitty coffee.
    Outside, on “main street,” Tansy tried his luck with a guy who looked newsy enough yet still adequately schlubby, a goateed tech guy with a large set of headphones around his neck and a cigarette in his mouth. “I dunno,” he mumbled through his cigarette. “Something about an active shoo—”
    “Okay, thanks,” Tansy interrupted, desperately unwilling to hear the buzz phrase of the day repeated for the hundredth time. “Do you guys have a police scanner in your van?”
    The guy seemed a little suspicious. “Who are you with?” he asked.
    “No one. Just myself.”
    “So why do you care about a police scanner?”
    “I’m just looking for the news, like you.” Tansy offered the guy a candy bar. Fresh from the gas station, it still felt cool in his hand. “So what are they saying on there?”
    He was looking at the candy bar. “Uh, no, that’s okay . . . I don’t want that.”
    Tansy shrugged and opened the wrapper. “It wasn’t a bribe; I was just being nice.” He took a satisfying bite of chocolate. “So, what’s the word on the scanner?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing?”
    “They hide all the important stuff on a private channel or something.”
    “Oh, come on,” Tansy said, his mouth still full of chocolate.
    “What?”
    “You guys don’t monitor that stuff?”
    “How? It’s blocked.”
    Tansy laughed. “What if we unblocked it?”
    “Isn’t that illegal?”
    “Listen, uh,”—he wrapped up the half-eaten snack and slid it into a cargo pocket on his shorts—“are you on a break or something?”
    The guy took a puff from his cigarette.
    “Okay. So on your break, let’s say you wanted to play around on your scanner. Alright? If you wanted to do that, could you then bring it over here and it wouldn’t be a big deal?”
    “Who are you again?”
    “Seriously, I’m just a guy. I’m just