Total Mayhem

by John Gilstrap

  “Okay, Big Guy, take out the electricals. NVGs, everybody.” He slapped his night vision goggles over his eyes. This was going to shit, and with the targets on alert, night vision was their primary force multiplier. And that advantage would evaporate as soon as the targets grabbed theirs.

  Jonathan’s words had barely cleared his lips when a gunshot split the night. It came from the left flank of their skirmish line—Team Two’s area. The two targets reacted instantly, dropping to their knees and ripping out a fusillade of unaimed automatic weapons fire.

  To Jonathan’s immediate left, Boxers’ 7.62-millimeter shoulder cannon boomed five times, launching a shower of sparks from the rear corner of the house and drenching the scene in darkness.

  Two seconds later, Jonathan settled his IR laser sight on the first shooter’s left ear and sent a round through his brain. The second shooter was diving back into the house when Jonathan took a shot at him. He was pretty sure it was a hit, but it wasn’t a kill. The guy was going to have a hard time sitting down, though.

  The front of the DeWildas’ house seemed to come alive with muzzle flashes and rifle fire.

  “One down, one wounded.” Jonathan announced. “Team One, are you ready to advance?”

  He looked to Boxers and Gail on his left, and they both gave him a thumbs-up and transmitted an affirmative.

  “Team Two, on my command, focus covering fire on the front door and windows. Team One will advance around the right side. When I tell you to cease fire, do so immediately. Two-one, do you understand?”

  Doug Kramer said, “Got it. Jesus, there’s a lot of lead coming this way.”

  “Two-two, do you understand your orders?”

  Charlie Keeling’s voice was half an octave higher as he said, “I got it. You want to give that order soon, please?”

  “Two-three?”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay, it all begins in three . . . two . . . one . . . Now!”

  As the tree line erupted in gunfire, Jonathan and Team One dashed out of their cover and moved as one to the cover of the nearest pickup truck. The outgoing fire from the house had diminished or maybe stopped. With Team Two concentrating their fire on the single known target that was the house, the impact of the bullets was something to behold. Pieces and chunks of the structure flew away or were reduced to dust as it gave way to the hundreds of bullets that were chewing up the façade. Jonathan couldn’t yet see the inside of the house, but in his mind it was being reduced to rubble, too.

  Jonathan, Boxers, and Gail crouched behind the safety of the wheel well.

  “Everybody okay?”

  “So far,” they said.

  “Haven’t had this much fun with my pants on in a long time,” Charlie Keeling said, reminding Jonathan that he was on VOX.

  He switched his radio back to PTT—push to talk. “I want to go in fast and hard through the back,” he said. “Usual procedures. I want to use a GPC on the lock just because, and when we breech, I’ll lead with a flashbang. That should leave them buggy. Then we clean up.” A GPC—general-purpose charge—was a lump of C4 explosive with a tail of detonating cord that would be initiated with a detonator. Weatherproof and mostly soldier-proof, GPCs were a staple of Security Solutions’ covert activities.

  “If they surrender?” Gail asked.

  “We’ll zip tie them and leave them for Doug and Wolfie to deal with.”

  Boxers said, “If past performance is any indicator, I don’t expect a lot of surrendering.”

  “Here we go,” Jonathan said. He switched his radio back to VOX. “Team Two, Team Two, cease fire. Cease fire!”

  Jonathan and Team One would be running through Team Two’s firing lanes, so he needed them to stop shooting. The sudden silence was startling.

  They dashed forward, moving as one entity, running at a low crouch, rifles up and ready to engage any target. When they reached the rear corner of the building, they stacked up on the red side as Jonathan sliced the corner, ready to engage any targets he saw.

  “Clear.”

  They advanced on the back door quickly, aware of the windows and of the fact that these trained warriors were as likely to stream out of the doors to flank their attackers as they were to stay inside. For now, they were donning gear, Jonathan assumed, but they could be kitted up in less than a minute. The last thing Jonathan wanted to engage in was anything close to a fair fight.

  Jonathan and Gail held back and covered the left and the right as Boxers moved to the door and placed a GPC over the lock and the jamb.

  Hesitantly, it seemed, the outgoing fire was resuming from the front. The bad guys were finding their footing.

  “Fire in the hole,” Boxers said, and he pulled the pin on the delayed initiator. He moved off to the side, and five seconds later the charge detonated, shredding the door and a good chunk of the back wall.

  Jonathan led the way through the opening and took a knee long enough to pull the pins on two flashbang grenades. He was in the laundry room, which opened up to what appeared to be the kitchen. “Eyes and ears,” he said, and then he tossed the grenades through the door.

  Jonathan barely got his hands pressed to his ears before the explosions shook the whole structure.

  Jonathan hoped the bad guys had had time to don their NVGs because if they had, the enhanced flashes would leave them blind for all the time Jonathan needed.

  “Moving,” he said, and they were off, again moving at a crouch. The enemy had been staggered, literally and figuratively. Every one of the fighters he saw had had time to sling their weapons, and three that Jonathan could see at first glance had donned NVGs for the darkness.

  It was a turkey shoot. The bad guys tried to resist, but they didn’t know how or where. And they certainly didn’t have the time. Jonathan and his team picked their targets and shot them. They fell and didn’t move. The entire battle, such as it was, was over in less than twenty seconds.

  “Team Two, Team One,” Jonathan said. “Hold your fire, keep an eye out for new arrivals. We’re all fine, the tangos are all down. We still need to clear the building.”

  Then he turned to Gail and Big Guy. “Everybody okay?”

  “That wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped,” Boxers said.

  “They got more warning than their victims did,” Gail said.

  They toured the carnage, verifying that those who appeared dead were, in fact, still dead. In total, they had killed eight people, seven men and a woman. Jonathan said, “Big Guy, how about you zip these guys up, clear their pockets, and get photos back to Mother Hen, while Gunslinger and I check the bedrooms and basement for more bad guys?”

  “Works for me,” Boxers said. Just to be on the safe side, Big Guy would roll each of the bodies onto its belly and tie their hands behind their backs with zip ties. That way, if they came to or pulled a Hannibal Lecter fake dead guy trick, they wouldn’t be mobile.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Arthur Evers was still a half mile out, Fred Kellner riding shotgun, when he heard the unmistakable staccato beat of small arms fire. “Goddammit,” he spat. “That’s coming from the rally point.” The plan was ruined—again. “We’re out of here.”

  As the chatter of gunfire evolved to sustained bursts, he yanked the wheel to the left, sending them onto a road that was marked only by a route number. People had just begun to slip out of their homes to investigate the noise when an explosion pulsed the chilly air. He knew then that they were out of business.

  “Shouldn’t we be helping them fight?” Kellner asked.

  “They’re dead,” Evers said. “If not yet, then soon. We can’t help them.” He looked to his passenger. “Did you have anything to do with this?”

  Kellner looked both shocked and confused. “Anything to do with what? The gunfire? Hell no.”

  “A few minutes ago, you were telling me that the attack on Fisherman’s Cove was a bad idea,” he explained. “And now this.”

  Kellner looked annoyed. “I had nothing to do with it. I�
�m a soldier, Iceman. I do what I’m paid to do. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. Our real concern is how deeply infiltrated we have become. Somehow the FBI—or this Jonathan fellow you keep talking about—has been able to stay a step ahead.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Evers said. “Of the operations this man and his team have disrupted, what do they all have in common?”

  Kellner shifted uncomfortably in in his seat. “I know what you’re going to say,” he said. “That I am somehow the common denominator. But that is not true. That first operation—the one the press calls Black Friday. My part of that went perfectly.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t going to say that,” Evers said. “You know the FBI caught one of the operators that night, right?”

  “No,” Kellner said. “I never heard anything on the news or anywhere else.”

  “That was by design,” Evers said. “I know this through my FBI contact.”

  “Well, there it is!” Kellner said. “Whoever they captured revealed secrets.”

  “He could not have known about tonight,” Evers said. “And he could not have known about Capital Harbor, because even I did not know about this rally point until hours before I sent out the alert. As for the Capital Harbor fiasco, someone had to have alerted somebody.”

  “Your man Steve, then,” Kellner said. “It was not me. I am not the problem. I am not one to sign my own death warrant.”

  Evers listened to the words, and he observed the man, and he still did not know what to believe. But he knew beyond doubt—even if he didn’t have any hard evidence—that the real common denominator to all the disasters was this fool, Jonathan Grave. He didn’t understand the nature of his involvement, and he didn’t know how he was able to do so much damage, but as he drove away from the rally point—away from Al-Faisel’s primary weapons cache for his Northern Virginia cell—he was more determined than ever to ruin the man.

  “You’re going through with this attack, anyway, aren’t you?” Kellner asked.

  “We are going through with it,” Evers corrected. “My handlers have paid for three attacks, and we have delivered only two. That aborted disaster of yours does not count.”

  “How? I thought all the munitions were back there at the rally point.”

  “We have rifles and ammunition,” Evers said. “And limited explosives. Here in the truck.”

  “There’s no way we can do the kind of damage you want to do with so little equipment.”

  Evers smiled. “It all depends on how we choose our targets,” he said. “I no longer care about the children in the school. There’s an old lady in that mansion on the hill. Grave calls her Mama, even though she is black. I don’t know the relationship, but I know the affection. We’re going to kill her.”

  “That’s not an attack,” Kellner objected. “That’s a murder. A hit. There’s nothing tactical in that, and it will not please your handlers, as you say.”

  “You say you are a soldier,” Evers said. “Act like it.”

  Kellner started to say something, then aborted the effort.

  “If you have something on your mind,” Evers said, “now is the time to get it off your mind.”

  Another aborted attempt, and then finally, Kellner slapped his thighs. “Okay,” he said, apparently to himself. “Remember you asked.” When he pivoted in his seat, only half of his face was visible in the glow of the dashboard. “You keep talking about breaking this man. About ruining his will to fight. I don’t know where all of that comes from, but has it occurred to you that this will inspire him to devote his life to retribution? And I mean the real kind of retribution.”

  Evers felt himself smirking. “Why, Mr. Kellner, do I sense fear?”

  “Not fear,” Kellner said. “Recognition. This is not a man to be trifled with. If you declare this kind of war on him, you will never sleep another restful night. I have seen him in action. I have seen the ice in the eyes of his associates.”

  There it was, Evers thought. There was the cowardice in Kellner. “So, you are saying that we should quit. That we should just let him get away with the murders of so many of your colleagues?”

  “Colleagues!” Kellner nearly shouted. “I didn’t know a single one of them. At least I don’t think I did. I can’t know because I’ve never met them.”

  “You were colleagues on the same mission.”

  “Okay, fine.” Kellner could not have been more dismissive in his tone. “Use whatever words you want. But I have no attachment to any of them and no driving urge to avenge their deaths.”

  Kellner fell silent, but Evers sensed that he had more to say, so he remained quiet to give him the chance.

  “But I’ll tell you what I do have an attachment to,” Kellner continued after his pause. “I’m attached to the notion of this being the end of it. Of me getting my life back and of living in peace without fear of you or Handler or anybody else trying to hunt me down. So, if you want to do this thing—as misguided as I think it is—I’ll go with you and fight at your side. But then you will never see me again. Agreed?”

  Evers sensed that he was being insulted, but as he listened to the words, he could find no fault in them. It was not cowardice to do your job and then retire. That was what Kellner was proposing, and at its essence, there was nothing wrong with it. “Agreed,” he said.

  * * *

  Jonathan and Gail focused on the main level first, clearing each of the three bedrooms and two bathrooms by the book, checking every corner and under every bit of furniture. It was too easy to lose concentration at moments like this. No matter how hard you tried or how professional you were, it was hard to pretend that there’s a credible threat when you knew in your heart that the enemy was already dead. The first floor took all of six minutes.

  Moving downstairs, he felt a little more amped. He hated stairwells. They gave the bad guy all the advantage. If a shooter was committed to his cause and willing to die for it, he needed only to wait and keep steady until his enemy showed himself from the feet up.

  If this were a true war zone, Jonathan would have led his descent with a fragmentation grenade or two, but these guys had been planning an assault. That meant a good probability of assembled munitions, and he had no desire to visit Mars tonight. On the other hand, basements were also places where people put the kids away to hide them from danger. Ditto the family pets.

  He led the way, illuminating the path with an IR flashlight that cast light in his NVGs as bright and shadows as dark as if he were using visible white light.

  “Good God,” he said as the scene revealed itself. There were enough explosives stocked here to rattle Tokyo if they went off at once.

  “Well, there went my last sympathy for the DeWildas,” Gail said.

  “Stay focused,” Jonathan said. “We’ve still got to clear the rooms.”

  “This is where we hope there’s no gunfight, right?”

  “Your lips to God’s ear.”

  The ceiling down here was low, and the place stunk of isocyanates and mildew. The space was mostly one room, but there were doors on the black and white sides. The one on the white side—the front side—was flimsily built and behind it they found a closet full of assorted gardening tools. Across the room, on the black side, the door was substantial and locked.

  “Now, right there is a door with a lock that is begging to be picked,” Jonathan said. He lifted the Velcro flap on a pouch on the right side of his vest and removed a lock-picking set. “Hold your light on the lock, will you, Slinger?”

  “You don’t worry about booby traps?” she asked.

  He froze. “Well, not until you mentioned it.”

  Clearly, the DeWildas had secrets worth hiding, and the steps they would take to hide them were a real question. They took the better part of a minute to search for some kind of initiating mechanism but didn’t see one.

  “Oh, what the hell?” Jonathan said. “If we trigger something, we’ll never know it.”

  “You could leave it for Wolv
erine and her crime scene experts,” Gail said. “There’s no point in ruining every bit of evidence they could use.”

  He paused.

  Gail continued, “I vote we contact Wolverine and call it a night.”

  * * *

  As Iceman drove past the sign welcoming them to Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, Kellner told himself for the hundredth time since he’d agreed to this foolishness twenty minutes ago that the mission came first. Of the hundreds of battles and skirmishes that he’d fought, both for Uncle Sam and for private contractors, precious few were conflicts that he believed in. He was just a soldier with rentable skills.

  And after this one last thing, he’d never have to fight again.

  Iceman parked their Suburban facing downhill, about fifty yards up from the mansion they were about to raid. He killed the headlights, and they watched the house in silence. The lights were on throughout the massive home, and two uniformed guards stood out front, each of them armed with a rifle and a sidearm. Beyond the house, in the space between it and the kids’ dormitory buildings, Kellner caught sight of shadows moving in the darkness. More guards, he presumed.

  “Looks like they’re expecting us,” Kellner said.

  “They’re on high alert,” he said. “It seems he knows I’d keep my promise.”

  Kellner felt something jump in his gut. “What promise?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” Iceman said.

  “I beg to disagree. It sounds exactly like something for me to worry about. You’ve been in contact with the Grave guy?”

  “I told him that he would pay dearly if he didn’t stay out of my business.”

  “Well, holy shit,” Kellner said. “They’re expecting us?”

  “They’re frightened of us,” Iceman corrected. “Let’s go.”

  Iceman dropped the transmission into DRIVE and once again headed down the hill, turning on his headlights as he passed the mansion. He drove down to the end of the street and paused at the stop sign at Water Street, where an elaborate building occupied the corner on the left. It looked like a firehouse, but it wasn’t.