As I’d told Wil Huckabee, I wasn’t making the plan, but when Pat came up with the general outline, I’d volunteered to take lead going into the bunkhouse. This was one of the most dangerous parts of the plan, Pat stressed, and where things could go wrong the fastest. If we’d had more men, or men with the proper training, we would’ve been assaulting both the big house and the barracks at the same time, but we didn’t, and we weren’t.
Instead, Pat, Wade and Ethan would take up covering positions around the main house while we neutralized the deputies in the converted barn. Pat’s exploration of the barracks revealed the front door opened into a roughly furnished ready room, with two rows of bunks, six per side, set up on the other side of a plywood wall. He’d warned us about the potbelly stove off to the left, but I could smell the smoke and the scent of burning pine knots as I shouldered my way through the door.
We weren’t wearing deputy uniforms, but we were relying on arriving in a known vehicle while wearing the Department issue rain slickers and liberated Stetsons to give the wrong impression for long enough to get inside and start the party.
“Shit, Sergeant, the old man’s pissed you boys are so late. You need to get over to the house right now and report in. Where’s that little girl you carried off with you?”
The speaker was a deputy named Rhymen, a short, fireplug of a man with a voice as rough as ten miles of gravel road. Wil and Mike pushed in behind me, acting like they were trying to get in out of the rain.
Deputy Rhymen was sitting in the dim light of the stove, sipping from a can of beer, when I shot him twice in the head from five feet away. The pistol had been concealed in the folds of my rain slicker, so all I’d needed to do was extend my hand and pull the trigger. The suppressor did the job, and the shots sounded like Rhymen had simply cleared his throat. The impact of the subsonic .45 ACP rounds drove the crooked lawman back in his chair, and he dropped the beer can in surprise.
I watched in frozen horror as the sixteen-ounce aluminum can seemed to catapult across space, heading inexorably to connect with the side of the stove. The sound might not rouse the sleepers to full wakefulness, but it might still spoil our bloodthirsty but practical plan.
Time seemed to stand still as I waited for the expected clatter, but it never came. Wil Huckabee slid across the rough wooden floor on his knees, moving with the grace of a gazelle as his left hand closed around the hurtling beer can with a barely audible crinkle of the thin metal. A single drop of the cool liquid tipped out over the lip of the wayward container, and I felt my legs unlock as I took a tottering step. Staring at the kneeling man, I simply mouthed, “thank you.”
Wil gave a sigh and nodded in response before clamoring to his feet and setting the can in the corner to join a half dozen other cans. I watched his hands shake just a bit as he turned to give me a jaunty wink.
While this tense drama unfolded, I’d momentarily lost track of my brother, but a quick glance showed Mike sliding his bulk parallel to the outside wall. I saw his head disappear for a quick second, peering into the dimly lit barracks room, and his gloved left hand went up as he showed four fingers back to us. He then laid his palm flat, and I read the motion. All still asleep.
“Watch the door,” I said softly to Wil, and I watched his grateful nod.
Mike and I might not be built for stealth, but we did our best to watch our feet and step carefully in the wan light offered by the one lamp the sleepers left burning by the bathroom. The sheriff had added a two stall shower enclosure and a single toilet when he’d commissioned the barn’s conversion, but even by the dim light we could see the showers and the toilet were unoccupied. At ten minutes after two a.m., we weren’t surprised to see everyone else but the night watch sacked out, but it made this job easier.
Pausing at the foot of the first bunk, I studied the faces I could see. Only two of the sleepers were turned our way, but I recognized one as the young punk who’d accompanied Ansel Steward to my flooded office, and who had eyefucked Nancy. The other one was another one of my good buddies. Corporal Branham, the shakedown deputy who’d nailed me on our way to see Andy. Mike made a slow circuit of the room to check the men, and it was all men in the New Albany County Sheriff’s Department except for the dispatchers and one female deputy who worked at the jail. Mike gave a nod.
Looking to Mike, I waved to catch his attention and gestured for him to stand back and keep a watch. He’d produced the small Sig Mosquito .22LR pistol he’d also equipped with a suppressor, but I was loathe to see him have to retire the thing after this. “Let me,” I mouthed, and Mike started to protest, but something in my expression made him stop and he inclined his head in assent.
My other reason remained my own. I didn’t want Mike to have nightmares about this, or to feel the guilt on his conscious. If I ever felt such, then it would be my burden to bear.
I’d never holstered the Glock, but I took a few seconds lining up my shots. I was standing close enough to the young punk to touch, so that was a chip shot, but one of the sleepers lay about ten yards away, holding down the bunk closest to the bathroom. I made sure to avoid casting a shadow, knowing that such a disruption might awaken a light sleeper.
This was murder, pure and simple. They were asleep, my rational brain insisted, and completely defenseless. We could overpower these men easily, slap some handcuffs on, and still take the sheriff. Then turn them over to the authorities…
My pistol cracked softly, four quick shots, then four more for insurance. The suppressor made the pistol barrel heavy, but I’d fired a half dozen practice shots back home to adjust to the feeling. Mike had even sacrificed one of the gel targets so we could recover the bullets and make sure they were never found on our property. That man thinks of everything, I thought as I made sure these crooked lawmen never made more trouble in our neck of the woods.
I looked down as the tinkle of hot brass fell to the wooden floor, landing in a rapidly spreading pool of blood. I knew head wounds bled a lot, but not when the heart stops pumping. I ejected the partially spent magazine and slid a fresh one home. Then reaching down, I turned on the small belt-mounted radio and clicked the press-to-talk button three times. Phase One was complete. Mike gestured to me and I preceded him out of the charnel house to find Wil Huckabee still guarding the door.
Wil gave me a look.
“It’s done. Let’s go.”
Wil swallowed and fell in line, his still-damp boots squelching lightly on the floor as we stepped back out into the rain.
Crossing the yard, I made myself maintain a steady, unhurried pace. We still acted like we belonged, and I didn’t want to give any advanced warning to the other side. Mike led the way this time, since we figured he looked the closest to Bailey in size. No one said anything as we stepped up on the wraparound porch, and despite the lit porch light, a measly 40-watt bulb, Mike took care to keep his face in shadow.
As we squared up on the door, I heard Pat’s soft voice. At first I thought it was over the earbud of the radio, but I saw a shadow detach itself from one of the empty planters on the porch and realized Pat had been standing right there.
“OPs were empty,” he said casually, his voice pitched low but not whispering. “Wade and Ethan are watching the road.”
We’d discussed this possibility with the renewed rain, and Pat had incorporated it into the plan. On his previous scouting trip, Pat had found two observation posts at the edge of the property, set up to allow guards to stay hidden while doing their jobs. Apparently, a few days of almost sunshine and the sheriff’s men decided they weren’t going back out in the rain, I mused.
“Anything?”
“Five down, no drama,” Mike reported.
“Saw four targets inside,” Pat replied, tension still in his voice. “Including the sheriff and Steward.”
Launching an attack like this, with almost zero intel on the site and with a pickup crew, clearly offended his professional sensibilities. Back at the house, Pat had said a raid like this would usually re
quire days spent observing the targeted house followed by hours of prep. He’d even described one mission where they’d built an elaborate mockup of the compound they’d intended to assault, hitting the doors and windows on a half dozen run-throughs before their helicopters launched to deliver them to the site. His initial scouting of the Landshire property was simply intended as a first peep in what should have been days of sitting on the target before any kind of attack.
Mike and Wil had exchanged a look before sharing a laugh. They clearly had a different experience in their time in the military.
“My LT used to draw up our attacks on the dirt, using a stick as a pointer,” Mike had explained. Wil went on to share how his lieutenant, an Annapolis graduate and a member of the Navy football team during his time there, had a playbook he used to deploy his Marines in preparation for a raid on a village.
“The night guard made it sound like Landshire was waiting for Bailey,” Mike continued, making his opinion known on how he wanted the entry.
We were prepared to enter hard or soft. Hard meant stacking at the door and using dynamic entry breaching tactics familiar to our three veterans. Soft…meant trying the front door and walking in. I tried the door. Unlocked.
I gestured to Mike.
“After you,” I murmured. As Pat fell in line behind Wil, I drew the Glock and took the last slot. Thanks to Pat, we knew the way to the sheriff’s office, and Pat indicated the lights were still on in the room. The heavy front door swung open on well-oiled hinges, and Mike simply nudged it with a shoulder as he carried the captured M4 already shouldered and ready to fire. Each of us copied the maneuver upon entering the house, but with barrels offset and pointed at an angle to cover the entry way and foyer. Mike led us deeper into the house at a steady pace, heel to toe as he seemed to glide over the hardwood floors.
As the last man in line, I was responsible for covering our rear. Unlike some missions Mike and the boys had described, we knew there were enemies in the house and all of us knew on some level that there would be hostile contact at some point. That was the reason for taking out the bunkhouse, since otherwise we would be facing a firefight with hostile reinforcements threatening at our backs.
I ended up mostly walking backward, relying on the others in turn to cover my back as I did the same for them. We had decided against trying to clear the rooms as we went if that option became available, knowing that any effort at this stage to root out the side rooms would give up our presence. This was risky, but we agreed unanimously the advantage gained in getting deeper into the house without alerting the enemy was too valuable to pass up. If we struck out on the ground floor, then the process upstairs would be a hard entry using copious amounts of suppressive fire, so we were hoping the sheriff was indeed working late.
I was focused on my job, eyes moving constantly as I scanned the doors when I moved past them, carbine sweeping in short arcs. I was riding an adrenaline high that’d started at the moment we’d entered the bunkhouse, and every sound and random motion had my attention as I scanned for threats. I knew I would crash hard later, but for now, I was cruising in the zone more than ever before as I covered my family and new friend.
When the moment for action came, I was looking the right way and still the deputy outdrew me. I didn’t recognize the man, an older deputy in his early forties with a frosting of gray in his short haircut, but he’d emerged from one of the side rooms carrying what looked like a bottle of top shelf Scotch. Quick as a striking snake, he dropped the bottle and had his pistol out before the liquor hit the ground.
The explosion of sound was nothing next to the hammerblow of impact when his shots struck me, punching me back against the wall. The M4 shook in my hands but I jerked back on the trigger, walking a burst from the floor to ceiling, bisecting the deputy diagonally from hip to opposite shoulder along the way. He gyrated wildly from the repeated hits, but I was beyond noticing at the moment as I slid down the wall and my butt impacted the hardwood floor. I couldn’t catch my breath, and I felt like my lungs were on fire.
I heard scrambling behind me, followed by shooting, but it was all I could do to hold onto the pistol grip of the carbine and aim back the way we’d come. I tried to steady the barrel, but I noticed my arms were shaking too hard to hold on a target. Weakness crept into my limbs as I tried again, unsuccessfully, to bring oxygen into my lungs. I wanted to scream with the pain and frustration, but I lacked the air.
My job was to cover the rear, and that’s what I was doing when the room tunneled down, and the light seemed to shrink down to a pin-prick.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I came to with a shudder, a spasm that ran through my body like a bolt of lightning and I felt hands holding me down as I struggled to find my weapon.
“Bryan, calm down, we got you.”
The voice registered, and I opened my eyes to see Pat sitting on his heels in front of me. He was doing that annoying eye-check thing with his pocket light, making me blink away from the sudden flashes as he checked my pupils. Concussion check, I realized.
I drew in an involuntary breath, and then gasped out loud at the shooting pain in my chest. Fire raced through my veins as I tried to twist away from the agony, but nothing I did seemed to change the intensity of the feeling.
“Your vest held, but you still absorbed three gunshots to the chest. Your chicken plate only stopped one, so you’ve likely got some cracked ribs. Blunt force trauma,” he added that last bit as if I couldn’t feel the evidence in my flesh.
“Everybody else okay?”
“Yeah. Team is fine. We moved you into Landshire’s office. We’ve got him and Haines. Steward didn’t make it, though. Caught one in the chest, but no armor,” Pat further explained.
I looked past my brother-in-law and saw we were in a wood-panel lined room, bigger than my home office but crammed with enough chairs and tables to make the space seem claustrophobic. I saw spent brass on the floor, along with three bodies. One was facing up, chest covered in blood. I must not have been down long, because the blood was still fresh.
The other two forms were laying on their bellies, wrists zip-tied behind their backs and black hoods covering their heads. From the belly flowing out to the side and the broad ass straining the uniformed trousers of one, I assumed that was our sheriff.
I heard rustling to the side, and I made the effort to twist my head, taking in the sight of Mike emerging from a walk-in safe. He had a stack of boxes of some sort in his arms, and from the way he was grunting, they weren’t light. I couldn’t see Wil, but I assumed he was around, probably posted up to stand sentry.
“Can I get up?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
“Fuck you, Doc.”
Pat gave me a tight grin and extended a hand, which I gripped the best I could as I hauled myself to my feet. The motion hurt like all hell, but once I was back up, I felt better. My chest still burned with pain, but after a few experimental breaths, I noticed the pain from the action was lessening. Looking around again, I noted the splintered wooden frame, and a massive footprint where Mike had breached the door.
Mike was wearing Bailey’s boots, which fit my brother with an extra pair of socks. If he was bothered by wearing a dead man’s boots, he never said, but we all thought the added bits, like using magazines bearing fingerprints likely traceable to the deceased deputies, would help our presentation of events. That’s what we were trying to do, setting a stage, on top of neutralizing an existential threat to our little community. Again, Wade and Ethan thought I was paranoid, Wil didn’t know what to think, and Pat just seemed amused by my degree of detail. He didn’t disagree, however.
“Why the hell did I pass out?” I managed to gasp out as I pulled a canteen off the side of my chest rig. I was pleased to see the bullets that’d impacted my chest managed to miss the old Boy Scout canteen in the web cover. Unlike Mike and the other military veterans, I’d never developed a feel for the plastic tube connected to a Camelbak, so whenever we went o
ut for a little time in the woods, I always carried a couple of canteens, instead. This annoyed Pat, since he thought the sound of water sloshing in the metal containers might give away our position.
“Shock, most likely,” Pat replied. “Seen it before. Feels like you got hit with a baseball bat, doesn’t it?”
“Never had that particular experience before, so I couldn’t say,” I muttered, twisting the cap back into place. “How long was I down?”
“Only a few minutes,” Pat replied, and I saw Mike coming back out of the huge safe with another load. These squares looked like salt lick blocks for cattle but wrapped in plastic. I had a feeling it was something else, though.
“Is that…”
“Yep, looks like blocks of cocaine, packaged for transport. What our sheriff was doing with that kind of weight is another question, though.”
“How’d you get the combination from Landshire so quick?”
“Open when we hit the door,” Pat explained with a dry chuckle, but then he continued more seriously. “Steward was inside, and he came out just in time to get himself shot. But look, we don’t have time to mess around, and we need to clear the rest of the house. You functional?”
“I’m up,” I replied, but my voice was still a little shaky. I sucked in another deep breath, wincing at the painful draw.
“Really?”
“You want me here guarding, or clearing rooms? And what about Wade and Ethan?”
“I checked with them already. They’re fine watching the road, and I think you’d do better sitting here and keeping an eye on these two. I’ll take Wil and Mike and we’ll make the rest of the house secure.”
“Any sign of Maddy’s roommate?”
“Nothing but some blood smears on the floor,” Pat replied with clear distaste. “You know she’s probably already dead, don’t you?”
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Page 29