Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Jake was glad to see that. He didn’t want a bunch of civilians cluttering things up.

  “I’ll get the one who split off from the others,” he said as he threw the door open.

  “We’ll try to round up the other three,” Barry said. He had noticed the same unexpected attire Jake had and added, “They don’t look like gangbangers.”

  Jake didn’t take the time to explain that the same thought had crossed his mind. He just jumped down from the truck with the Browning in his fist and took off after the man who had fled into the median.

  The man was still in sight, heading toward a rugged, rocky, brush-covered hill that blocked the view of the highway’s westbound lanes. If he reached the little crag, he might find some pretty good cover, and he had a big enough lead that Jake didn’t know if he could stop him in time.

  Of course, Jake could stop and try to wing the guy, maybe shoot a leg out from under him, but at this range that would be difficult, even for an excellent shot like Jake. And you never could tell where a bullet would go. It might sever an artery and quickly prove fatal.

  So Jake kept running, hoping to cut down the lead with his long legs.

  The man started climbing the slope, ducking behind an upthrust of rock. Jake was expecting what happened next. His quarry stuck a gun out from behind the rock and took a shot at him.

  Jake veered sharply to the left, then back to the right. He didn’t know where the bullet went, but it wasn’t close enough for him to hear it.

  He fired the Browning on the run and saw a shiny streak appear on the rock, not far from the head of the man he was after. The bullet coming that close made the guy jerk back, as Jake hoped it would.

  A couple of long strides sent him up the hill and kept the rock between him and his quarry. The man had thought to use it as cover, but it actually protected Jake now. He charged up the hill, keeping the stony upthrust on his right.

  He reached the top of it, leaped out onto the rock itself, and saw the man trying to scramble away. Jake launched himself in a diving tackle.

  His shoulder caught the man in the small of the back as his arms wrapped around the guy’s legs. The impact brought the man down, hard. He cried out in pain.

  But that didn’t stop him from twisting around and lashing out with a kick aimed at Jake’s head. Jake got his right shoulder up and took the kick there. It landed with enough force to make that arm go numb all the way down.

  The guy tried snapping another kick at Jake’s face. This time, Jake caught his ankle with his left hand and stopped the kick before it could land. He twisted hard, and the guy had to roll over onto his belly to keep his knee from snapping.

  Jake pushed himself up, landing with both knees in the small of the man’s back. The man screamed and arched the top half of his body off the ground. Jake looped his left arm around the man’s neck and tightened his grip as he pulled up.

  The man pawed feebly at the forearm pressed across his throat like an iron bar. After a moment, his hands fell away from Jake’s arm, and he went limp.

  Jake maintained the choke hold for a little longer, just to make sure the man actually was unconscious, but not long enough to risk killing him. When he let go, he stood up and shook his right arm, trying to get the feeling back into it more quickly. It was already starting to tingle as the momentarily deadened nerves came back to life.

  He was about to turn and see how Barry and Gretchen were doing in their pursuit of the other would-be assassins when a flurry of gunshots sounded from the direction of the highway.

  CHAPTER 48

  “Hand me that AR-15 I had you get out,” Barry said to Gretchen as they got ready to go after the other fleeing members of the hit squad. “And that extra magazine.”

  She handed them over. “Are you going to shoot them?”

  “Those guys?” Barry shrugged. “I’ll give them a chance to surrender.”

  He stepped down from the truck, brought the rifle to his shoulder, didn’t seem to aim at all, and squeezed off three shots in the space of an indrawn breath.

  One of the bullets knocked the side mirror off the Toyota’s passenger side. The other two starred the front passenger window.

  The three men stopped in their tracks, turned, and returned the fire with their handguns. They were still within range for the pistols to be effective, but they must have been pretty shaken by everything that had happened. Their shots fell well short, chewing up the pavement.

  Barry took a little more time before triggering his fourth shot. One of the men spun off his feet, dropping his gun and grabbing his thigh where Barry had just drilled him.

  The other two started running again. Barry shot a leg out from another one, who tumbled to the ground in an awkward roll. The remaining man made it to the Toyota, circled it, and jerked open the rear door on that side.

  What he brought out and set on the car’s roof made a huge racket—like a hundred hammers striking a hundred nails almost but not quite in unison—and it kept going. Barry grabbed Gretchen’s arm and ran for the safety of the truck as bullets tore up the highway almost at their feet.

  The hail of lead from the full-auto weapon wasn’t able to follow them as they darted around the Kenworth’s front end. Its armored cab blocked that death storm.

  “That’s a machine gun!” Gretchen exclaimed. “Like, a big machine gun!”

  “Yeah,” Barry agreed.

  “How are we going to stop him? If we set foot out of the cover of this truck, he’ll shoot us to pieces!”

  “Let me get into the sleeper. I’ve got something that’ll deal with him.”

  With slugs still hammering into the armor plates, Barry climbed into the cab. He stayed low. He believed the bulletproof glass would withstand the continued pounding of the full-auto fire, but nothing would hold up forever, no matter how strong.

  When he emerged a couple of minutes later, dropping to the ground beside Gretchen, he held a long-barreled revolver that prompted her to ask, “What in the world is that? It looks like an Old West revolver, only the giant-sized version.”

  “That’s pretty much what it is,” Barry told her, raising his voice to be heard over the racket. “It’s based on the Colt Single Action Army, only it fires a .600 Nitro Express round instead of a .45. An Austrian company made a few of them. With as big and heavy and awkward as it is, it’s not really good for much except a few very special circumstances.” He looped his right thumb over the hammer and drew it back to full cock. “Like this one.”

  With that, he waited a couple of seconds until the assassin’s weapon fell silent. Had to be changing magazines. Barry stepped out from behind the big rig’s front end, leveled the revolver in a two-handed grip, and fired.

  The Toyota rocked on its shock absorbers as the huge slug struck the passenger-side window, blowing it inward, smashing through the driver’s-side window, and plowing a fist-sized hole through the body of the machine gunner.

  Through the now blasted-out windows, Barry saw him flop on the ground behind the car. The way he went down told Barry that he wouldn’t be getting back up again.

  Barry lowered the massive gun and said, “That guy won’t tell us anything. Let’s go check on the other two.”

  He set the revolver on the floorboard inside the truck and picked up the AR-15. Taking the lead, he moved toward the two men whose legs he had shot out from under them. Gretchen was close behind and slightly to one side with the Glock held ready.

  “Here comes Jake,” she said.

  Barry glanced toward the median and saw his nephew trotting toward them with a motionless figure draped over his left shoulder. Given Jake’s size and strength, an unconscious man didn’t seem like too much of a burden.

  One of the men Barry had shot was out cold, too. From the looks of the bloody welt on his head, he had hit it and knocked himself out when he fell.

  The other man was still clutching his thigh and moaning as he writhed around on the ground. A pistol lay a few feet away from him. He glanced at
it as Barry and Gretchen came up to him.

  “I know what you’re thinking, amigo, and I wouldn’t try it,” Barry advised him. “Anyway, I’d say there’s a good chance if you let off the pressure on that leg wound, you’ll bleed out pretty quick.”

  The man spewed rage-filled obscenities at them, but he didn’t reach for the gun.

  He was in his late thirties, probably, with curly brown hair and a cleft chin. The all-American sort, although the way he was cursing them, he didn’t sound that way.

  Gretchen lowered the Glock slightly, stared at the man on the ground, and exclaimed in obvious disbelief, “Jason Harwell!”

  Barry’s eyes narrowed in surprise as he looked over at her and asked, “You know this guy?”

  “I ought to,” Gretchen said. Her voice shook a little. “I’ve worked with him before. He’s an agent for the Department of Homeland Security.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Jake came up, carrying the man he had captured, in time to hear what Gretchen said. Her statement shook him, but he didn’t let it show.

  Instead, he lowered the unconscious man to the ground and said, “How about this guy? Do you know him, too?”

  Gretchen swallowed hard.

  “I do,” she said. “His name is Alex Durant. He works for the TSA. We were on the same task force for a little while.”

  The Transportation Security Administration was part of the Department of Homeland Security, Jake knew, a different branch from the investigative arm Gretchen worked for—or had worked for, since she probably didn’t have a job anymore after throwing in with him and Barry.

  The thought had crossed Jake’s mind earlier, when he first got a look at the hit squad, that they looked like government bureaucrats.

  He hadn’t expected to discover that his wild idea was actually right.

  “Take a look at the other guy who’s knocked out,” Barry told Gretchen with a bleak note in his voice.

  The wounded man she had called Jason Harwell snarled and said, “I’ll save you the trouble. He’s Dave Clemons. You remember him, Rogers?”

  “Yes, I do.” Jake could tell Gretchen was fighting to keep her voice from shaking even more. “Who . . . who else was with you?”

  “Steve Frazier.”

  Gretchen closed her eyes and sighed. Her face was drained of color now.

  “You know him?” Jake asked gently.

  “He brought me coffee once, during a meeting.”

  “And you killed him!” Harwell burst out. “This . . . this traitor here shot him with that cannon!”

  “I’m not a traitor, son,” Barry said flatly. “Whoever told you that has sold you a bill of goods.”

  “Maybe not a traitor,” Harwell responded through clenched teeth, “but you’ve been running around murdering people all over the country. You’ve gone rogue, mister, and you need to be put down like any other mad dog!”

  “Does that go for me, too, Jason?” Gretchen asked.

  “You were a good agent, Rogers. But these men are a danger to the country! They don’t follow orders—”

  Jake said, “When it comes down to following orders or saving lives, I’m going to do the right thing.”

  “Following orders is the right thing,” Harwell spat. “The people running the government know what they’re doing. You can’t just . . . just let normal people decide things. They’re too stupid! I mean . . . look who they’ve been voting for.”

  “Yeah,” Barry said, “the people got in the way of your Deep State train and derailed it a few elections ago, didn’t they? You’ve been trying to get it back on the tracks ever since, but with only limited success.” Barry shook his head. “Too bad for you that you don’t control all the news anymore.”

  Gretchen said, “Wait a minute. That whole Deep State business people have been talking about for years is just an urban legend. There’s not some sort of secret . . . cabal . . . inside the government bent on running everything.”

  “The hell there’s not,” Barry snapped. “It’s cropped up in agency after agency. Those Alphabet Boys just love to take orders like good little Nazis.”

  “Hey!” Jake said. “I work for the FBI, remember? At least, I did. I’m one of those Alphabet Boys.”

  Barry shook his head and said, “Not really. That’s why you’re on the run now, and statist bottom-feeders like this slug are trying to kill you.”

  Gretchen stood there shaking her head slowly, struggling to accept what was obvious. It went against everything she had believed. But the bloody evidence was right in front of her.

  She took a deep breath, moved a step closer to Harwell, and lifted her Glock to aim it at his face in a two-handed grip. His eyes rounded with surprise and more than a little fear.

  “Who sent you after us, Jason?” she said. “I want a name.”

  He spewed another torrent of profanities, interspersed with a few uses of “slut” and “whore” that made Jake’s jaw tighten. He stepped forward and said, “Mister, I’m about to plant my boot in the middle of your face.”

  “Back off, Jake,” Gretchen said. “This is between me and Jason. And he’s going to tell me what I want to know . . . or maybe I’ll shoot him in the other knee.”

  “You don’t have the—”

  Sneering, Harwell was about to name the requisite part of the male anatomy when Gretchen shifted the Glock, squeezed the trigger, and put a round into the dirt no more than two inches from his left knee. He jerked, which made him scream from the pain in his already wounded right leg.

  “Now, Jason,” Gretchen said as the echo of the shot faded.

  “C-Cavanaugh.”

  “Mitchell Cavanaugh?” Barry asked sharply. “He’s DOJ.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He . . . he’s coordinating things . . . it’s like a task force, although they’re not calling it that. He’s brought in people . . . from several different agencies. Their job is . . . to run you to ground.”

  “And kill us,” Jake said.

  “Those weren’t . . . explicit orders for everybody. Just . . . some of us.”

  “The deepest of the Deep State,” Barry said. “The ones Cavanaugh can trust to commit murder.”

  “Our own people,” Gretchen murmured.

  Barry looked at her and said, “It’s been going on for a long time. Since the 1990s, anyway. Remember what happened to anybody who was . . . inconvenient . . . or posed a threat to those in power? Plane crashes, ‘muggings’ gone wrong, three shots to the back of the head getting an official verdict of suicide.

  “The more things change, the more they stay the same. The monsters doing that crap get a free pass from the news and half the country. That inner circle’s grip on things has been shaken in the past ten years, but it hasn’t come loose yet. Not completely. And they’re going to hang on until they’ve drawn their last breath—”

  Barry stopped abruptly, shaking his head.

  “Rant’s over. What’s important is that you know the truth now, Gretchen. Cavanaugh’s unleashed the full power of the government on us, and that means local law enforcement won’t know any better and will be after us. And the Zaragosas still want our heads, too.”

  Jake said, “So all we have to do is dodge all that while we find out what those terrorists are planning and stop them from killing a bunch more innocent people.”

  “Yeah,” Barry said, “that’s—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence because at that instant, a shot cracked. Gretchen made a little noise, dropped her gun, staggered to the side. She looked down in shocked horror at the crimson flower of blood blooming on the front of her shirt.

  CHAPTER 50

  Barry reacted instantly, turning, bringing the AR-15 to his shoulder, and squeezing the trigger all in one smooth, swift move. The rifle cracked.

  The man Harwell had identified as Dave Clemons jerked as the bullet bored through his brain and snapped his head back.

  Clemons had regained consciousness, listened to the interrogation of Harwell long enough t
o know what was going on, and found the strength to raise his gun and fire the shot at Gretchen. He would never do anything else, though.

  Jake leaped to catch Gretchen as her knees buckled and she started to fall. As his arm went around her, another shot sounded close by. Harwell had let go of his wounded leg and lunged toward his gun, snatching it up and triggering as he angled the barrel toward Jake.

  The wind-rip of the bullet was loud in Jake’s left ear as it passed close by. An instant later, the AR-15 in Barry’s hands barked again. The close-range shot turned Harwell’s all-American face into a bloody, ugly mess.

  Gretchen sagged in Jake’s grip and moaned.

  “You’re all right,” he told her, because that was what you said to people who’d just been shot. “You’re gonna be all right.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide with pain and shock, and tried to say something. But although her lips moved, no words came out. Her eyes rolled up.

  For a second, Jake thought she was gone. He could still feel her breathing, though, as he cradled her limp form against him.

  “We have to get her to a doctor!” he told Barry.

  “I know. Let me give you a hand. We’ll put her on the bed in the sleeper.” Barry shifted the rifle he held. “Let me take care of that other one.”

  He pointed the AR-15 at the man Jake had captured. Alex Durant, that was what Gretchen had called him. Jake knew Barry was about to shoot him.

  “Wait.”

  “We can’t take a chance on the guy waking up and trying to kill us like the others did.”

  “But they were trying to kill us. He’s unconscious. This would be an execution.”

  Barry looked like he wanted to ask what was wrong with that, but then he jerked his head in a curt nod.

  “I’ll secure him.”

  He took zip ties from his pocket, went to Durant, and fastened them around the man’s ankles and wrists after pulling Durant’s arms behind his back.

  Then he hurried over to Jake and took Gretchen from him. She was unconscious now. Jake stepped up into the cab, reached down, and took her from Barry to carry her into the sleeper.