by Brent Towns
Sirens sounded in the distance, their droning wail piercing the night.
“Here comes your ride,” Brick said to Reardon.
“Maybe I’ll get lucky and die on the way,” Reardon mumbled.
Traynor pointed a firm finger at him. “You cancel that crap right now, brother. I know you’re in a lot of pain, inside and out, but don’t you dare talk like that.”
“Sorry, Pete. It’s just…” More tears spilled.
Traynor softened his voice. “Yeah, man, I know.”
He ached for his hurting buddy and wished he could take away his pain. Mike Reardon had been a bona fide badass back in the day, but now he just looked—and sounded—weak and broken, a man from whom all zest for life had been stolen. His will to live had been sucked right out of him, leaving behind a hollow shell. Traynor reckoned that if they failed to save Jeremy, Reardon would probably end up gargling a gun barrel.
“Swear to me,” the DEA agent said. “Swear to God that you’re going to bring my boy home.”
Even now, when a fake promise might have brought comfort, Traynor refused to lie to his friend. Instead, he gave him the truth. “I swear to God we’re gonna try.”
“He’s all I got left, Pete.”
“I know.”
“You find him, Pete. You find him, and then you rip the guts right out of whoever took him from me.”
“Reaper is hitting the next target as we speak.”
Reardon looked at him with haunted eyes as the ambulance crew rushed in. “Whoever it is, if they had anything to do with this, you make him hurt. Make him hurt bad.”
“If he can lead us to your boy, then Kane will make him scream like hell if that’s what it takes.”
Chapter 5
Shawangunk Ridge, New York
Steve Nash’s nerves jangled, but he was too seasoned an operator to get seriously rattled. Panic was for sissies. Sure, he felt fear, but he put a choke collar on that mutt and used the fear to fuel his survival instincts. Controlled fear kept you sharp, helped you maintain your edge, and true warriors knew how to channel it to their needs. The adrenalin pumped hot through his veins, setting his blood on fire, triggered by the alarming phone call he received earlier.
“Hello?”
“You’re being hunted. Code Blue.”
The words came out in one long, run-on rush. Then, with a click, the line went dead.
Code Blue, the signal for evasive action. Basically, he had been advised to blow town and lay low until the heat simmered down. It left a bad taste in his mouth—he preferred fight to flight—but he knew his bosses expected him to suck it up, swallow it down, and obey their orders.
He grabbed his bugout bag and hopped in his Dodge Charger. As he whipped out into the street, the weight of the Colt .45 riding in shoulder leather gave him comfort. He was a big believer in .45s over 9mms or .40s or—God forbid—.38s. The bigger a hole you could blow in somebody, the better.
A grim smile ghosted his lips as he punched the gas and smoked some rubber off the tires. If these mysterious operators wanted to tangle with Steve Nash, then he would be more than happy to make them eat their own guts. They could try to play tough while slurping on their own innards. He had plenty of combat experience, and no Rambo wannabes would have him pissing his pants.
If not for the Code Blue command, Nash would have hung around to test his mettle against these motherless pricks. But where the Colombian cartels were concerned, you followed orders, or you found your tongue yanked out through your esophagus in a gruesome parody of a necktie.
So he would get out of the city and hole up in his lodge until the storm passed. Maybe hunt some deer over on the Mohonk Preserve tomorrow, fry up some tenderloins for supper. Sure, they weren’t in season, but when you’re one of the top dogs in the DEA assisting the cartels with smuggling tons of cocaine into the United States—and getting filthy rich in the process, thanks to some carefully-laundered funds in offshore accounts—a little poaching just didn’t seem like that big of a deal.
Nash parked his Charger at the base of the private drive leading up to his cabin. The rest of the way was too rugged for the sports car. He fetched a four-wheeler from a small shed under a nearby tree, oblivious to the fact that his head was divided into four quadrants by the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope.
“Need me to range you?” Cara asked, straight-faced but her tone sarcastic, keeping her voice sotto voce so it wouldn’t carry on the night air as she lay prone in the dirt and leaves beside Axe. The ex-recon marine sniper had the M110A1 CSASS tucked tight in his shoulder pocket, eye behind the scope.
With the crosshairs aligned on his target, Axe didn’t want to move his head and lose the sight picture, so he tried to inject some glare into his voice as he growled, “It’s under two hundred meters. I could make this shot with my eyes closed.”
Cara smiled. “Just offering.”
“Shut up and let me shoot this guy.”
Kane had sent word that Nash had bugged out. They had set up an ambush on the wooded slope that rose above the southern side of the cabin’s private drive. They had been lying in wait for the last two hours. In another ninety minutes, it would be dawn, but right now the moon still ruled the sky.
“Don’t kill him,” Cara reminded. “We need him alive.”
“Yeah, I got it.” Through the scope, Axe watched Nash fire up the four-wheeler’s engine. It rumbled to life, and after giving it a few revs, he headed up the trail, dirt spraying from beneath the knobby tires.
Axe made a slight adjustment to the cross-hairs. His finger took up trigger slack to the breakpoint.
The four-wheeler’s headlights flicked on at the same time Axe sent a bullet tearing through the darkness.
Nash yelled in pain as the high-velocity impact smashed him off the ATV, his left shoulder exploding at the joint, leaving his arm dangling by just a few mangled threads. He smacked down in the dirt, the gravel gouging ruts from his face.
“Not sure if he’s got a gun or not, but he’s definitely not well-armed,” Axe deadpanned.
Cara groaned. “Sniper jokes are worse than dad jokes.”
Nash was clearly smart enough to realize his attackers were still out there, waiting, lurking, concealed by the night. He knew he needed cover and needed it quick. He began dragging himself toward the four-wheeler, which had veered off the trail and stopped against a tree once it lost its rider but was still running.
Before their quarry could reach the ATV, Axe drilled two rounds into the fuel tank, turning it into a fireball. Chunks of burning wreckage rose into the air and then fell back to earth like a rain shower from hell. Axe saw a piece of molten rubber spatter Nash’s face and cling there like napalm, eating through the flesh. He clawed at it with his good hand as he climbed to his feet and stumbled toward the woods, no doubt looking for somewhere to hide.
“He’s running,” Cara said.
“Not for long.” Axe sent another shot thundering through the darkness.
The bullet nailed Nash in the back of his left knee and damn near blew his lower leg off. He howled in agony and crashed to the ground, clutching at the blood-spurting injury.
With their target down and not going anywhere, Axe and Cara vacated their sniper’s nest and made their way down the slope, threading through the rocks and trees until they materialized out of the shadows, standing in a silvery slash of moonlight.
They stared down at Nash with eyes chiseled from arctic ice. Not the cold, soulless emotion of a shark, but the cold determination to do whatever it took, without hesitation, to get the job done. With their ice-eyed gazes, they let Nash know that there would be no mercy, no backing down. Time was ticking, and they had come to play rough.
With a kid’s life on the line, and as a mother herself, Cara knew she would go to any extreme necessary to get Jeremy Reardon back. Crossing lines, breaking rules, getting her hands bloody… sometimes that was the only play left.
But clearly Nash wasn’t one to just crap his pant
s, roll over, and fold like a paper tiger. With his system no doubt jacked up to red zone levels on pain, he nevertheless snarled, “Fuck you.”
Axe responded by crashing a boot into Nash’s mouth. Teeth shot everywhere like broken Scrabble tiles. The blow sent him sprawling flat on his back as blood continued to pour from his knee and shoulder, forming a sticky puddle that looked black in the moonlight.
“Watch your mouth,” Axe growled. “I don’t think your mother would approve of that kind of language.”
“Go to hell,” Nash spat.
Cara drew her Sig M17 and held it muzzle-down by her leg. “Stop talking and start listening. The DEA has become bed buddies with the cartels. Word on the street is you know who the top dogs are. We want their names.”
“Eat shit,” Nash hissed through pain-clenched teeth.
“Buckle up, boy-o,” Cara said. “It’s about to get rough.”
Axe kicked him in the face again. Two more teeth sluiced down his throat on a river of blood. He choked and gagged and vomited up chunks of shattered enamel.
“If I wanted to eat shit,” Axe said, “I’d go to your mother’s house for supper.”
Cara knew plenty of operators who disavowed torture, calling it an immoral waste of time, but that was crap. When you needed someone to give up information fast, the escalation of pain would usually get the job done. Those who made up excuses about the ineffectiveness of torture for intelligence-gathering were just afraid of their actions being labeled barbaric.
Cara didn’t care if they called her barbaric or not. Nash was a bad guy, and she would torture the shit out of a bad guy to save an innocent boy.
She crouched down and jammed the Sig’s muzzle into Nash’s lower abdomen, right between nuts and navel. “Give me the names, or I’ll blow your guts out.”
Pain, shock, and blood loss conspired to send Nash drifting into a numbing Neverland. But he snapped out of it when Cara stabbed even deeper with the pistol barrel.
“I don’t know!” he yelled, blood spraying like spittle from his crushed lips. “You hear me, bitch? I don’t know!”
Cara took no pleasure in torture, but when the time came, she didn’t hesitate. Especially when the subject was a corrupt DEA agent who helped the cartels flood the country with cocaine, murder an innocent woman, and kidnap a little boy.
The Sig bucked once, the report muffled by the muzzle’s point-blank proximity to Nash’s stomach. His entire body convulsed as the bullet blasted all the way through. Blood sprayed across the ground, and Cara knew the scavengers would soon come sniffing around.
“Warned you,” she said. “Now give me the names. I’ve got fourteen more bullets in this thing right now, plus three backup mags. I will make your life unbelievably miserable.”
Nash was clearly broken. No more foul curses or profane insults out of his mouth, just groans of agony. He had probably been trained in torture-endurance techniques, but that only got you so far. The human body can only take so much suffering before mental willpower cracks. Nash had been put through the wringer by a couple of warriors who would smile at the devil right before they shot him in the balls. With one arm and one leg blown off and a slow-kill gut-shot giving him a drawn-out, agonizing death, all he wanted now was an end to the pain. He would have sold his mother for a mercy bullet to the head, and the puppet-masters behind the DEA-cartel alliance were damn sure not his mother.
As the hurt crashed through his body in waves, his mouth fired information like a machinegun. Cara and Axe listened intently as he laid out the whole dirty operation, including the names of the head honchos.
Paul Jacobs and Miguel Sanchez.
The men behind the curtain. The string-pullers. The dirtbags at the top.
Otherwise known as dead men walking, as far as Team Reaper was concerned.
“What about Jeremy Reardon?” Cara asked. “Where’s he being held?”
“I don’t know,” Nash said.
Cara rapped the Sig against his remaining kneecap. “Do not lie to me, Nash.”
“I don’t know!” he said, louder this time. “Shoot me again if that’s what you gotta do, but I don’t know where the damn kid is!”
“You’d better tell me how to find him before I get all trigger happy again.”
“Jacobs,” Nash blurted. “Jacobs will know where he is.”
Cara nodded. It had the ring of truth to it, plus it made sense. “Fair enough,” she said, removing the gun from his knee.
Nash looked up at her. “Now kill me already, will ya?”
“Sure.” Cara raised the Sig and shot him between the eyes, blowing his brains out the back of his skull and ending his misery.
“You okay?” Axe asked.
“I’m fine,” she replied. “He had it coming.”
“You’re damn right he did.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
They didn’t waste any time looking at Nash. They had killed him, he was dead, and that was that. They’d seen plenty of guys with their heads blown off. Axe canted the rifle over his shoulder as they walked away, and Cara holstered her pistol. They had blitzed their way up the ranks and now had the top dogs in their sights. The dealers of white death were collapsing one by one, the dominos falling, the illicit empire starting to crumble. The savages were getting savaged. But Team Reaper’s work wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.
Jeremy Reardon wasn’t home yet.
Until he was, the blood and thunder would continue.
Chapter 6
Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
Manhattan, New York
The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, in Manhattan, could claim to be the fifth largest Christian church in the world, a stunning architectural masterpiece of stone-on-stone construction in the Gothic Revival design that boasted the largest Rose window in the United States. Tourists and parishioners alike often commented that the church was so breathtakingly beautiful, it felt like holiness permeated the place, the stones infused with the hundreds of thousands of prayers that had been uttered in hushed, reverent tones over the centuries.
The Right Reverend Christopher Wilkes wondered if perhaps a hundred thousand prayers were sailing heavenward right at this very moment as he looked out at the sea of troubled faces. For better or worse, many people turned to God, however temporarily, after a tragedy. Wilkes hadn’t seen a crowd of this size gathered since the morning after the Twin Towers fell. Now, the morning after yesterday’s trio of terrorist attacks on the city, the cathedral’s hallowed walls once again swelled with hurting souls seeking answers, seeking hope, seeking solace.
What they got instead were death and destruction.
As the organ notes faded, Reverend Wilkes began a solemn speech, his tone warm and comforting. “Brothers and sisters, yesterday was perhaps the darkest day we have ever seen, but today is a new day, and with a new day comes new hope. Hope that light will emerge from the darkness and—”
His last words. The bomb blast cut off the rest. The Right Reverend Wilkes was blown to pieces, along with everyone in the front three rows. They had come hoping to hear from God; in the blink of an eye, they all met Him.
Three more explosions rocked the sanctuary, filling the holy place with fire and debris. Blood and body parts flew through the air like broken toys flung by an angry child. The dead lay twisted and mangled while the dying screamed and writhed in their final moments. The wounded crawled toward the door, dragging themselves across the floor, weeping eyes fixed on their salvation. Many were trampled underfoot by the panicked survivors stampeding for the exit; the breath smashed from their lungs.
In the final tally, the bombing of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine left one hundred and twenty-three dead and nearly double that wounded.
They had come seeking Heaven.
They found hell instead.
George Washington Bridge (GWB)
New York / New Jersey
The GWB connecting New Jersey and Manhattan is cons
idered the busiest bridge in the world, and while the morning after the three terrorist attacks saw a noticeable decrease in traffic as people avoided the city, it was still congested on the iconic double-deck suspension bridge during the morning commute. Not bumper to bumper like usual, but the bridge was still busy.
However, the congestion proved no problem for the eighteen-wheeler oil tanker truck that rammed its way through the traffic, smashing cars out of its way as it plowed right up the middle of the four lanes, leaving crushed metal and broken glass in its wake. It was a live-action version of demolition derby, cars spinning away from the bruising contact of the big rig, sparks flying as steel grated against steel. Drivers who saw the truck coming tried to get out of the way, but there was nowhere to go, no room to maneuver out of the path of destruction.
Smaller cars were shoved on top of other vehicles, collapsing the roofs and trapping—sometimes killing—the occupants within. Electric sparks hissed across spilled fuel pouring from broken lines and set cars ablaze. It took just under ninety seconds for the eighteen-wheeler to brutally force its way to the center of the bridge, the midway point between the two gigantic suspension towers. It then jackknifed to the left, skidding the oil tanker across all four lanes. It rammed another car in the process, flipping it onto its roof.
When the semi-truck shuddered to a stop, the door popped open, and the driver emerged. Wearing an olive drab balaclava, thin leather gloves, and a yellow running suit, he clambered up on top of the tanker as a symphony of curses, screams, and honking horns goaded him on.
He turned and faced the destruction he had caused, surveying the wreckage strewn behind him after his maniacal charge to the center of the bridge. Nobody could see it, but beneath the mask, he smiled. He raised his arms like a Pentecostal preacher about to pray down revival and shouted, “Allahu Akbar! Bin Laden rises!”
At that moment, the people closest to the jackknifed rig noticed the detonator in the man’s right fist. Small, unobtrusive, and oh so deadly. It was the last thing they saw before they were vaporized.