by Sam Sisavath
Neither possibility made any sense. Buck already knew; the increased security around the town was proof of that. So why did Fenton look so…normal? It wasn’t just in the bored ways the guards watching the front gate acted, or in the disinterested patrols they’d encountered. No. It was the whole place. It was so damn calm.
For a brief—very brief—moment, Keo entertained the idea of dropping the current mission and returning to the real mission, the reason he was here in the first place.
The warehouse. What are you hiding in that warehouse, Buck?
But the moment faded quickly, and he was back on track:
Kill Buck, and Fenton would be without a leader.
Kill Buck, and the raids would stop.
Kill Buck, and the war would be won.
Kill Buck, and Lara would be safe.
And he could achieve all of that while keeping Lara’s hands bloodless. He was, after all, Keo. He was the guy who had splattered Mercer’s brains on Black Tide Island five years ago and ended his murderous crusade. It would be an easy story to sell: He decided on his own and lied to Lara’s people—which were all true, even if he did suspect that Claire might already know the truth.
Cut the head off the snake, and the body dies.
It’s the only way, Lara. It’s the only way.
Jeremy was still in the lead, walking at the same unhurried pace since they left Claire. Keo had to admit, the kid was impressive. Claire couldn’t have chosen a better “convert.”
“You did good back there,” Keo said to Jeremy now.
“I almost shit my pants,” Jeremy said. “I think I might actually have.”
“Which part?” Rita asked.
“All of it.”
“Oh.”
Keo smiled and thought, At least it wasn’t just me.
He said, “You’re doing fine.”
“Thanks,” Jeremy said.
“Where’s that conference building?”
“It’s not far,” Jeremy said, before turning left and abandoning the path they’d been on, only to start on another one a few seconds later.
They passed more buildings, each one clearly recently constructed. Keo didn’t think most of the structures in the compound were here even just a year ago, just like the warehouse.
“Buck’s been working hard to put it all together. Years of work, getting it ready,” Greengrass had said.
“Years of work, getting ready…”
Getting ready for what? That was the question. What was Buck’s ultimate endgame? What was he trying to accomplish that made him form an unholy alliance with Blue Eyes?
“There,” Jeremy said, nodding forward at one of the larger buildings they’d seen since stepping through the front gate.
It was single-story, but had sections and looked joined together from three separate structures. It occupied a large patch of land near the very center of the compound, and unlike the other buildings they’d walked past so far, had men standing guard outside its front doors and around it. There were two out front and a couple of two-man teams moving along the sides that Keo could see. Likely more, on the other sides, that he couldn’t.
Jeremy led them past the conference building without stopping. The guards outside the front doors glanced over, but then away just as quickly. As they walked past, Keo tried to glimpse anything through the windows. Not all the curtains were pulled in, and he got a good look at figures moving around inside, but the angles were wrong and he couldn’t make out any of their faces. But something was definitely happening in there, because there were very awake people standing around talking.
Keo picked up his pace to walk alongside Jeremy. “How long have they been in there?”
“Two, maybe three hours,” Jeremy said. His voice had dropped to almost a whisper.
He’s scared, even if he doesn’t show it. Kid’s brave, I’ll give him that.
“How many are inside?” Keo asked.
“I don’t know,” Jeremy said.
“Guess.”
Jeremy didn’t, at least not right away. He thought about the answer before finally replying. “Five to ten.”
“Buck and his lieutenants?”
“Yes.”
“But Buck is definitely in there?” Rita asked from behind them.
“Yes,” Jeremy said.
“Are you one hundred percent sure?” Keo asked.
“I stopped to talk to one of the guards earlier, and he confirmed it. Buck’s in there. He’s the reason they’re all in there.”
Keo glanced back at Rita and saw the look of determination on her face. He didn’t bother asking her if she was ready or if she could do this. He imagined her response would have been something along the lines of “Fuck yeah.”
He turned back to Jeremy. “Where’s the armory?”
“The armory?” Jeremy asked, his body tensing slightly.
“You guys have an armory, don’t you?”
“Of course we do. We have a few of them, actually.”
“Where’s the closest one?”
“What do you want with it?”
“I would love nothing more than to barge into that little meeting and shoot Buck between the eyes,” Keo said. “Maybe even look him in those eyes first before I do it. But it’s late, and I’m tired, and I’m guessing blowing the building up should achieve the same results, minus or plus a few extra bodies. What do you think of that plan, Rita?”
“Fuck yeah,” the sniper said behind him.
Sixteen
Getting into one of Fenton’s armories was easy. Too easy. For a moment, Keo almost expected some kind of trap that as soon as he stepped inside men with guns would either shoot him down or capture him. Buck himself might even jump out of the shadows to prove that this entire night was one big joke at Keo’s expense.
But it wasn’t a trap, and the two armed guards standing outside nodded at Jeremy, who entered through the double front doors of the steel building without having to say a word. Keo and Rita followed closely behind him and got a close-up look at what Buck’s people had been hoarding over the years.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
The warehouse was large with an arched high ceiling, and bright lights hummed to life as soon as they entered, revealing row after row of racks holding handguns, rifles, and multiple shelves of ammo. There were sheathed knives and machetes, with light and medium machine guns hanging off the walls. Some were newer than the M60 Keo had seen watching the front gate, which struck him as odd—why were the guards using older equipment when there were newer models right here?
But he didn’t dwell on why the Buckies did things the way they did. The whole place barely made any sense, including why Buck was even picking a fight with Black Tide in the first place. Besides, right now he needed weapons, but not just any weapon. He needed the right kind.
“How do they keep track of everything?” Keo asked, his voice echoing slightly off the metal walls around them.
“Keep track?” Jeremy said.
“People don’t just come in here and take what they want, do they?”
“Actually, they do. No one’s supposed to be in here—in the compound—who doesn’t belong. Everything in here is surplus; we don’t have nearly enough soldiers to use everything we’ve stockpiled.”
“So you guys were just stocking up?”
“Buck’s people were, yeah. They brought most of this stuff over with them when they first showed up in Fenton, but they kept adding to it. There’s a lot of stuff just lying around out there.”
“I guess we can just take what we want, and no one will notice,” Keo said.
“Pretty much,” Jeremy nodded.
“What about the guards outside?”
“They won’t care. They’ve seen people come out of this place with plenty of weapons before.”
“In the middle of the night?”
Jeremy seemed to think about that question for a bit. “I don’t know. I don’t think they’ll care, but…I don’t know.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Keo said, and began walking through two of the rows.
Rita followed behind him, while Jeremy remained at the door.
“What are we looking for?” Rita asked.
“Something we can take out a building with without having to actually get too close,” Keo said.
“What, like a mortar?”
“No. Something more hands-on.” Keo glanced back at Jeremy. “Someone told me you guys had shoulder-mounted rockets?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremy said. “I haven’t really looked the place over. Try the back. That’s where they keep the big guns.”
“I think I found them,” Rita said.
Rita was standing in front of a wall of “big guns.” There were a dozen or so anti-tank and Swedish-made AT4s, along with some American-made LAWs. But it was the larger and more formable-looking M141s that drew his eyes.
“Oh yeah,” Rita said, following where he was looking. “That can definitely take down a building.”
“That’s what it was designed for,” Keo said.
He plucked one of the shoulder-mounted weapons from the wall and got a feel for its weight—sixteen pounds, give or take, and thirty-two inches in carry mode, longer when it was ready to fire. The effective range was somewhere under a thousand meters, but Keo wasn’t going to need even most of that. All he required was a clear line of sight to the target.
“How many does it shoot?” Rita asked.
“One,” Keo said.
“Just one?”
“One’s all you need.”
“I guess we could always carry more than one with us.”
“No,” Keo said. “If we need another shot, we’re already screwed.” He perched the launcher on his right shoulder and nodded at Rita. “Ditch the rifle and grab a carbine with an M203 and plenty of ammo.”
“I don’t want to ditch my rifle,” Rita said.
“You’re going to need the extra firepower. Trust me.”
Rita sighed. “Goddammit, Keo, I really like this rifle.”
“Black Tide can get you another one.”
“But not like this one.”
“It’s not the gun that matters, Rita, it’s the person pulling the trigger.”
She smirked. “This coming from a guy who can’t live without his MP5SD submachine gun?”
Keo grunted. “Shut up and follow orders, soldier.”
“Yes, sir,” Rita said, and gave him a mock salute.
Keo walked back up the rows to Jeremy, still waiting at the doors.
The Bucky’s eyes widened slightly at the sight of Keo with the M141 on his shoulder. “Jesus. You really are going to try to blow him up.”
“Did you think I was kidding?”
“Kind of.”
“I wasn’t. If I can get the job done from a distance, I’ll always take that option.”
“Is that thing really going to do the job?”
“The warhead’s capable of penetrating two hundred millimeters of concrete. You think the building Buck’s in has two hundred millimeters of concrete protecting him?”
“Um, no.”
“Then yeah, it’ll get the job done.” Keo snatched an M4 from one of the racks and tossed it to Jeremy, who just barely caught it. “Grab some ammo.”
“Me?” Jeremy said.
“You’re in this now, kid. There’s no turning back. When Buck’s nothing more than a pile of ashes and bones, we need to get the hell out of Dodge.”
Jeremy looked down at the rifle. He was holding it as if it were something that could bite him if he wasn’t careful.
“Claire will be waiting for us,” Keo said.
The young man looked up at the sound of Claire’s name, just as Keo had expected.
Like a dog hearing a whistle.
“She told me you were leaving town with us,” Keo said. “Is that true?”
Jeremy nodded. “I’m going wherever she’s going.”
“Then that means this is your last night here, because she’s going home with us. So grab a tactical pack and fill it with as much ammo as you can carry. Getting out of here is just one part of it; there’s still the woods and everything else inside it to deal with.”
“You’re talking about ghouls?”
“I’m not talking about Boy Scouts.” He turned around as Rita walked up behind him. “Time to ring Claire up and fill her in on the plan.”
The armory was just a shade over a hundred meters from the conference building, which meant Keo and Rita didn’t have to walk very far backward to reach their target. Not that they went directly there; at least not while the two armory guards were staring after them and had been since they stepped outside the warehouse with the weapons.
If Buck’s people ever get their shit together, they might actually be dangerous.
Not that Keo was complaining. He had what he needed, but he couldn’t just waltz over to Buck’s location and start using it. At least not without attracting a lot of attention. Besides, he needed to give Claire and the others time to get ready anyway.
He followed Jeremy, who was now carrying an M4 rifle and a pack bulging with supplies, away from their target. They walked along the path carved into the ground by hundreds of vehicles before them for about five minutes before turning left into a pitch-black space between two buildings that might have been barracks.
Jeremy stopped and turned around, his breath quickening noticeably. Keo leaned the M141 against the wall of one of the buildings, then stuck his head out from the shadows and glanced over to see if anyone had followed them up the well-lit “road.”
No one had, and the two armory guards in the distance had gone back to looking bored outside the warehouse doors.
Keo pulled his head back and found Jeremy waiting behind him. “You sure we can circle back around to the conference building without being seen?”
“All we have to do is avoid the patrols,” Jeremy began, but never finished because—
Footsteps were approaching their location.
Keo unslung his MP5SD, Rita doing the same to the carbine she’d swapped her Mk 14 for, just as two figures moved up the road they had left seconds ago. Two men, white clouds shooting from their lips as they shivered against the cold, walked past them.
Goddamn, I think I almost had a heart attack.
Keo relaxed a little bit as the footsteps slowly faded, but he didn’t completely unclutch his submachine gun until he couldn’t hear them anymore.
“Okay,” Keo said, turning back to Jeremy. “Take us back.”
“You sure you wanna be doing this?” Jeremy asked. “Buck’s not what you came here for. It was the warehouse, remember?”
“The mission was always fluid. If we knew ahead of time where to find Buck, he would have been the main target.”
Keo couldn’t be sure if Jeremy believed him—or Rita, next to him, for that matter—because it was just too dark to see much of anything in the alley. He could make out Jeremy nodding, though, before the young man started moving toward the other side of the alleyway.
They followed the Bucky (Former Bucky now, I guess), Keo with the M141 once again perched on his shoulder. It wasn’t heavy enough to slow him down, but it did take both hands to hold it in place, which meant he couldn’t keep at least one hand on the submachine gun at all times. That made him uneasy.
But it wasn’t the only thing that kept him alert and looking around. There were so many buildings, so many patrols, and so many chances of being caught before they even got a shot at Buck that he wondered if this wasn’t as bad an idea as Jeremy thought. And he was still feeling a little paranoid about how easy everything had been up to now.
Getting into Fenton, then the compound, then the armory…
It’s not a trick. Why would it be a trick? It doesn’t make any sense. Why let me get this far?
So why was he hyperventilating?
Jesus. Calm down. It’s not like this is your first rodeo, pal.
He’d done this b
efore. Too many times to count, even before the world went to shit. It just so happened that back then people were paying him good money to risk his hide. Everything was so much simpler then. There was no cause to bog him down, no right and wrong to limit his options. There was just good ol’ fashioned greenbacks.
“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”
Remember that? Whatever happened to that?
The end of the world, for one.
Then she came into his life. He thought he had gotten away, but oh, was he wrong.
So much for running away being the answer.
Despite the overwhelming paranoia that he couldn’t shake—and in fact kept increasing with every step—about forty-something minutes later, they were close enough to the conference building that Keo felt a little silly. Certainly, if this were a trap, they wouldn’t have allowed him to get so close to Buck with a weapon that could blow him to hell with one pull of the trigger.
A sudden burst of optimism that this plan could actually work popped to the surface, but he had to tamp it down. Not now. Not yet. He’d allow himself to indulge when it was over and he was beyond the fence.
Until then…
It had taken forty-something minutes because they had to steer clear of Bucky patrols. Three crossed their paths on the way back, and each time they had to stop and wait for the men to pass. Keo hadn’t wanted to risk being spotted by the patrolmen while he was carrying the rocket launcher; the guards at the armory hadn’t cared enough to stop them, but all it would take was one overly curious patrolman to ruin a perfectly—at least, up until now—good night.
They had settled in a dark alley between two buildings that looked much too small to be barracks like the last two, but would do the job. Keo went down on one knee and prepared the M141.
“Jeremy, go with Rita,” Keo said as he moved the weapon into position.
“Now?” Jeremy said.
“This thing packs one hell of a backblast. You don’t want to be anywhere close to me—especially back there—when it fires.”
“Oh,” Jeremy said, and turned to go.
Rita hesitated. “We really gonna do this?”
“You having second thoughts?” Keo asked.