Ghost Warrior II : Irish Sister

Tucker stopped at the corner room—windows on two walls, one facing the front yard, the other toward the road to town. He turned in the doorway, scanning the angles.

“This one.”

Rebecca tilted her head. “For sleeping?”

“No,” Tucker said. “This’ll be our ops center. Views both approaches, decent cover, easy access to the stairs.”

She nodded. “Your call.”

Tucker turned to Keys. “Toss our bedrolls in the other rooms. This one’s for work.”

“Roger that,” Keys said, already peeling off his pack.

Rebecca watched them both, something steady in her eyes. 

“You boys get settled, set up, whatever you need to do,” Rebecca said, standing in the hallway with one hand braced on the doorframe, her hair tied loosely over one shoulder. “I’ll head downstairs and make us some sandwiches. And coffee.”

She looked between Tucker and Keys, eyebrow arched.

“I assume you like it like Chris does—hotter than hell, darker than night, and strong enough to make a Death Star flinch?”

Keys chuckled. “Sounds like fuel.”

Tucker just gave a small nod. “Perfect.”

Rebecca laughed and turned down the hall, her footsteps light on the old pine floorboards as she disappeared toward the staircase. The soft creak of the stairs followed her descent.

Chris leaned against the doorframe of his old room, arms crossed over his chest, still moving a bit stiff from the bruises. “So, what are you thinking, Boss?”

Tucker stood by the window of the corner bedroom, staring out at the tree line. His posture was loose, but his eyes were sharp.

“I don’t know yet,” he said slowly. “Don’t know enough to call it. Something about this feels off. Calculated. But we’re flying blind.”

He turned back to Keys. “Let’s get this room up and running. Until we understand what we’re dealing with, we prep for everything.”

Keys nodded and got to work, pulling cases from the gear bag they’d hauled in. He opened the largest one—a reinforced Pelican case—revealing a custom-built digital rig: matte black chassis, carbon casing, cooled by a low-hum turbine module. It powered up with a pulse of soft blue light, and the room took on a different kind of energy.

“Let’s spin up the eyes,” Keys said.

He set the rig down on the old oak desk that had once belonged to Rebecca’s grandfather and began deploying hardware—each piece fitting into a precise position like it had been rehearsed.

Within five minutes, a directional antenna had been mounted outside the corner window, disguised under an eave, aimed with surgical precision toward the rural road that led into town.

“External scanner’s up,” Keys muttered. “LIDAR overlays, movement tagging, signal heat mapping. Anything digital gets flagged before it gets near the ranch line.”

He reached for a smaller silver box—about the size of a lunch pail. Snapped it open. Inside was a military-grade stingray unit—low-power, encrypted, and silent.

“This will clone every unshielded SIM card that passes within one thousand meters. Cell calls, text traffic, even some unencrypted app messages. If they’ve got a phone in their pocket, I’ll see it.”

Tucker didn’t move. Just nodded. “Set it to passive for now. Monitor, don’t ping.”

“Already done.”

Another unit went under the desk—mounted with magnetized brackets—a compact device with a series of miniature antennas and a glowing blue LED that faded to black as it activated.

“Rolling encryption matrix online,” Keys added. “I’ve layered the property’s Wi-Fi with a shadow network—900 gigs of false traffic, spyware, and beaconed trap nodes. If they try to breach us digitally, we’ll know where they are before they even get a clean connection.”

Tucker stepped forward, watching the feed populate across the screen. “How secure?”

Keys grinned. “I’m using a rotating call-sign tunnel on a dark mesh subnet that doesn’t officially exist. DARPA tech, burned and rebuilt by a JSOC lab in ’06. We don’t just listen—we predict.”

Chris stepped into the room, nodding in quiet appreciation. “All this on granddaddy’s desk.”

Keys finally looked up and smirked. “Guy had great taste in furniture. And now it’s command central for something a little more… aggressive.”

Tucker moved to the window again, watching the edge of the horizon. The sky was velvet black now, the only light from the faint glow of a crescent moon above the barn.

Keys gestured toward the back corner. “Got a microdrone on standby. Nestled in the loft above the tractor. Wide-spectrum optics, passive IR, thermal scan. If anything bigger than a tit mouse walks toward this house, I’ll know its weight gait, and whether it’s carrying steel.”

A soft chirp echoed from the console. Keys glanced at the screen. “Firewall’s hot.”

Rebecca stepped back into the doorway, “Got sandwiches and coffee ready downstairs”. Her eyes caught the faint blue glow from the screen, the cables, the gear spread across her grandfather’s desk.

She blinked. “So, let me get this straight. You’re doing all that—listening, watching, intercepting—from my grandfather’s office?”  Keys looked up with a straight face. “Yes, ma’am.”

She nodded, slowly. “And… this is legal?”  He tilted his head. “Define legal.”

Tucker stepped forward “We’re not watching anymore,” he said.  Rebecca stared at him. “What are we doing, then?”   Tucker met her gaze, voice low.  “We’re hunting now.”  Then he smiled, and said, “let’s go eat”, and they all made their way to the stairs, Keys glancing at his mobile phone to ensure his alerts from the systems he just set up are working.