Before going any further Ben paused to examine the tyre tracks on the makeshift road. The driveway clearly saw a good deal of traffic. Heavy truck wheels had compacted the crumbly oyster shell deep into the dirt. Narrower, lighter tread impressions had been made by cars and motorcycles. As a way of trying to determine how many men might be living on the island, it didn’t tell him much.
Ben motioned for the party to split into their prearranged four-man units. As per his instructions, they fell into formation on opposite sides of the road, keeping to the verge so as to leave no tracks on the oyster shell. Ben’s A Team moved along the right edge. Roque’s B Team kept pace on the opposite side. The sheriff clutched his old shotgun in the low-ready position and walked like an infantryman expecting screaming enemy hordes with fixed bayonets to charge at him from the bushes at any moment. Maybe he was right, Ben thought. Team C moved behind Team A and was mirrored by Team D on the left side. They kept well spaced apart, the way he’d instructed them to.
The tension was palpable, and it wasn’t all just coming from the sheriff. There were a lot of anxious faces and nervous eyes glinted in the dappled moonlight. Ben could feel it pouring in waves from Officer Hogan, the frustrated US Marine, who stalked behind him with her rifle poised for action. He understood very well how they felt, remembering the nerve-shredding experience of his own first-ever military raid operation as a young soldier.
The truth was, you never got used to it. And in fact, you shouldn’t. Because the day you did might well be the day you’d drop your guard, get blasé, fail to notice the threat coming at you out of nowhere, and end up being flown home in a flag-draped coffin.
Ben slackened his pace a touch, allowing Hogan to draw level with him. She looked at him in surprise as he moved closer. He whispered, ‘You’ll be fine. Stay near to me, okay?’
Hogan whispered back, ‘You worry about your own ass, buddy.’
So much for sympathy.
On they went. The winding road snaked ever deeper towards the heart of the island. The tree canopy became thicker, blotting out the moonlight until it became so dark that Ben flipped down his night-vision goggles and turned them on. The world suddenly turned to that familiar eerie shade of green through which enemy tracer fire looked like science-fiction-movie laser bolts.
But no gunfire erupted from the trees. No murderous gangs of rednecks came at them with axes or machetes. The raid team must be close to the centre of the island by now, Ben thought, and they were yet to encounter a living soul, let alone meet any kind of resistance.
But it was just a question of time before things happened. And you never could tell what that would be. As military tacticians had been wisely observing for centuries, war was the realm of chance, and the best-laid strategic plans could fall into total disarray at the drop of a hat. Ben had seen it happen enough times to understand how old sayings got repeated so often they became clichés, bandied about by every army training instructor he’d ever known. But they were no less true for being unoriginal.
Some minutes later, a glimmer of light through the trees up ahead sparkled bright green in Ben’s NV goggles. He held up a closed fist to signal the others to halt. The way he’d done before, he left them hovering uncertainly to his rear and moved on ahead a couple dozen yards to scout the way, moving like a shadow.
The oyster-shell driveway curved around sharply to the right. Cutting the corner, Ben stalked closer to the source of the light and saw that it was coming from a house, some thirty yards away through the dense vegetation. Very slowly, very quietly, he approached alone for a better look.
It was a small, simple, stone-built house, little more than a cottage. Rough in its lines, not quite square or true. Ben guessed it had stood here since Leonidas Garrett first staked his claim and settled on the island, just after the Civil War, more than a hundred and fifty years ago.
The ground around the little house had been levelled and hard-packed with stone and oyster shell to form an unfenced compound that comprised a variety of other buildings. The nearest was a modern prefab that looked like a barracks hut, long and low. Other metal sheds were clustered in the background, the moonlight shining dully off rusty sheet roofs. All the buildings were in darkness except for the house, from whose narrow windows the glow of light sparkled like green magnesium flares in Ben’s goggles. No movement from the windows. If someone was at home, they were keeping well out of sight.
Ben remembered Sallie Mambo’s account of how she and her friends had managed to sneak onto the island all those years ago in 1933 and got close enough to see the house, before the sudden appearance of a wild-looking man with a gun had made them run for their very souls, as she’d put it. Elmore Garrett. By Ben’s reckoning it was his grandsons who now lived here.
But nobody was bursting outside to confront the intruders this evening. There was no sign of movement and not a breath of sound from anywhere. No night birds sang on the island. Even the insects seemed to have abandoned it.
Quiet. Too quiet. To Ben’s ears, the silence was deafening. The deathly stillness of the place, bathed in that eerie green light, made him think of the evil spirits that Sallie believed to dwell here and possess the souls of the wicked. And for a moment, he could almost have believed it too. He was suddenly oddly aware of the little mojo bag she’d given him, still hanging around his neck.
Waylon Roque’s hoarse whisper rasped in Ben’s radio earpiece. ‘What’s happenin’? Over.’
Ben replied softly into his mic, ‘Come and see for yourself. Over.’
A few moments later he heard the rustles and snapping twigs as Roque and the troops gathered behind him. He turned to face them, putting a finger to his lips. A herd of foraging wild hogs would have made less commotion.
Roque had finally given in to the need for night vision. His campaign hat was awkwardly jammed on over the headgear of his goggles, making him look like some kind of weird space cowboy. The sheriff stalked up to where Ben was crouched among the bushes. The shotgun was clenched tightly in his fists.
Roque surveyed the buildings and nodded authoritatively, as if he was still fully in charge of this mission. ‘We got ’em,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘Like rats in a trap. All we gotta do now is surround the house and move in.’
Ben looked again at the compound. Those darkened buildings. The light pouring from the empty windows. The total stillness. He didn’t like what he was seeing. His sixth sense was telling him that something wasn’t quite right.
His mind suddenly began to race. He thought again about the open gates, and how easy it had been to just walk onto the island. How even a group of harmless children couldn’t venture into the Garretts’ sanctuary without being challenged.
It was bugging him. It was wrong, somehow.
And that was when three things happened.
The first was that Ben looked up. He would never know why he did, at that particular moment. A sudden rush of paranoia, maybe, as his mind became gripped by uncertainty. Looking around him for inspiration. Psychic intuition. Or just pure chance.
But what he saw sent an ice-cold spike through his heart and momentarily drained the breath from his lungs. The trees above him were rigged with wireless miniature cameras and motion sensors. Dozens of them, all around, everywhere. He’d been so focused on the light coming from the house that he’d passed right under them, oblivious of a security monitoring system that could have been triggered by a spider crawling in the dirt anywhere near the compound.
Which meant the Garretts had been watching the raid party the whole time. They’d probably been following their progress from the very moment they’d stepped onto the island. And that the light from the house had been a deliberate distraction to lure them in.
And that Ben and the entire raid team had just blundered right into a trap.
Then the second thing happened.
The words ‘Fall back!’ were still forming on Ben’s lips when the darkness of the woods behind them suddenly came alive in a sweeping burst
of green light that detailed the bark on the trees and threw a confusion of giant shadows everywhere. With a throaty growl the big Rhino SUV came tearing up the driveway from the direction of the bridge.
Ben could suddenly see the enemy’s game plan unfolding. Jayce and Seth Garrett hadn’t despatched their men to the Big Q Motel after all. Anticipating the raid with uncanny precision, they’d set the whole thing up as a feint to invite the police to walk straight into an ambush.
How could they have known?
Ben couldn’t answer that question. But he could be certain that the gates to the island, left open deliberately to entice the intruders, would now be locked shut. And that he, Roque and the rest of the troops were now prisoners in the Garrett brothers’ own private hell. The trap was well and truly sprung.
And the Hebert family … Ben couldn’t even begin to imagine what would happen to them now.
The Rhino kept speeding up the driveway, big tyres crunching and pattering on the oyster-shell surface. The dazzling roof lamps lit the forest up so brightly that Ben’s NVG bloomed out, the image turning solid green-white as the goggles became overwhelmed by all the photons pouring in. He ripped them off, blinked against the strong light and shouldered his rifle to take aim at the incoming vehicle. But just as he was expecting the Rhino to keep coming right at them, instead it suddenly veered off sharply in the other direction, lurching and bucking wildly over the rough ground.
It rolled to a halt, its doors burst open all at once, and five men jumped out, all clutching guns. Ben held his fire. He couldn’t shoot until they did. This was a police raid, not a war. But instead of opening fire, the five men scattered and took cover among the trees as though—
As though they knew something else was about to happen.
And something was. Something not even Ben could have anticipated.
Chapter 59
From behind the house came the thunderous engine note of a big, powerful V8 turbo-diesel, throatier and deeper than the sound of the Rhino. It was a sound that Ben had heard on battlefields in the Middle East, Africa and war-torn eastern Europe, and would have recognised anywhere. The unmistakable tank-like roar of what the American military mind had dubbed the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, HMMWV, and everybody else called a Humvee. A monster all-terrain truck that could climb vertical walls and carry enough armour to survive land mine explosions.
The dark hulk came racing out from its hiding place behind the buildings and sped across the compound, straight towards where the intruders were hiding in the bushes. Then blinding halogen spotlamps three times brighter than the Rhino’s suddenly blazed into life, flooding the woods with a harsh white glare and turning night into day. Ben, Roque and the others were suddenly exposed right out in the open with nowhere to hide.
The light was too bright to make out the driver’s face, but Ben instantly recognised the silhouetted outline of Jayce Garrett at the wheel of the open cockpit.
The cops were breaking into a panic. Amid the sudden chaos, out of the corner of his eye Ben saw the big ginger-haired officer, Charlie Fruge, making a break for it towards a thicket of trees and throwing himself flat in the dirt. Roque brought up his ten-gauge, thumbing its hammer back to full cock. Hogan had followed Ben’s lead and thrown away her NV goggles. She had her carbine shouldered and was swinging its muzzle wildly here and there, eyes pinned wide open in a look of grim determination as her law enforcement training melted away under the heat of self-preservation instinct and she searched for a target to start blasting away at.
But if Hogan had been betting on getting in the first shot, she was about to be beaten to the post. Because in the next split-second, all hell broke loose.
The night erupted into shattering noise and fire.
Ben had seen, driven and destroyed all manner of light combat vehicles like Jeeps and technicals equipped with everything from heavy machine guns to rocket launchers. But what he glimpsed now as he instinctively threw himself to the ground was like nothing he’d come across before. The weapon mounted on the roofless top of the Humvee lit up like a jet afterburner. Its screeching roar, so continuous that it was impossible to hear the individual shots being fired, was the nightmare of infantry divisions and tank regiments. It was a Vulcan rotary cannon from a fighter aircraft, transplanted onto a truck. It threw a shell weighing nearly quarter of a pound at three times the speed of sound. A hundred of them every second. Such a monster weapon was designed to destroy buildings, armoured fighting vehicles and other solid materiel targets from medium to long distances away. Turned on human beings at point-blank range, the effect of its firepower was pure carnage.
As the raid team were about to discover. The shockwave of the weapon’s power seemed to suck the air away. Tree trunks came crashing down as though a giant chainsaw had sliced through them. A storm of splintered wood and severed branches, bark and pulp and sap spattered over Ben as he lay pressed tightly down against the mossy wet ground.
Some of the cops had been too slow to do the same. Wyatt Earp of C Team had barely registered what was happening by the time he was sawed in half below the sternum. The upper and lower portions of his body hit the ground yards apart. Hogan’s female colleague had been turning to flee in horror when the cannon fire blew away her right leg at the hip and she fell into the bushes, the sound of her scream drowned by the thunderous gunfire. Sheriff Roque let off a blast from his shotgun and then corkscrewed to the ground, blood flying in the glare of the spotlamps. As Ben watched, Deputy Fontaine and four more of the police officers were cut down as the woodland was razed to stumps around them. They had no chance. It was pure slaughter.
The Humvee came rolling forward, still firing continuously. Aircraft pilots could only let off short blasts from the dreaded Vulcan, for fear of the massive recoil stalling their planes. Jayce Garrett had no such concerns. The cannon went on and on, swivelling left and right on its mountings, churning up the ground, hammering ruined trees into matchwood, spattering dead bodies that were already diced into pieces.
Still clutching his rifle, Ben was pinned motionless behind a knot of tree roots that he knew was utterly useless cover. The cannon shells would rip through iron-hard wood as though it was playdough, pass out the other side virtually unscathed and convert him into mincemeat. He just had to stay hidden and pray.
If anyone up there was listening. A strafing volley sent explosions of dirt showering over him as it passed much too close to where he lay. He felt a stunning impact all up his arm as a random shell struck the rifle in his hand. He jerked his hand back as if he’d been bitten, and rolled violently out of the weapon’s trajectory expecting to feel a hellfire volley of shells tearing his body apart. But the withering fire of the cannon was already carving its swathe of destruction elsewhere.
Ben saw his chance. He rolled over another turn, and then another, until he reached a patch of shadow out of the glare of the Humvee’s lights. Then he jumped to his feet and looked desperately around him for some way to make the killing stop. He saw none.
It was then that he spotted Hogan on the ground nearby. She was curled up on her side. She’d lost her helmet, and her hair had come loose and covered her face. At first he thought she was dead, but he could see no blood; then in the next moment he realised she was trembling as she lay there clutching her knees to try to make herself as small as possible, like a frightened child.
He ran over to her, snatched up her fallen M4 and opened fire on the Humvee. One long sustained rattle of full-auto, until the magazine was spent. Bullets sparked and zinged harmlessly off the armour-plated bodywork. He might as well have been shooting a kid’s airgun at it.
Ben threw away the empty rifle and reached down to yank Hogan to her feet, yelling, ‘Come on!’
Hogan’s eyes gleamed in the light. She stared at Ben for an instant as though she wasn’t sure if he was friend or enemy. Shock and terror could numb the mind that way. But then she focused, and took his hand. He hauled her upright and they ran. Just in time,
because Jayce Garrett had seen the muzzle flash of the M4 and rotated the cannon back in their direction. A second later, there was a fresh crater of torn earth and ripped foliage where Hogan had been lying.
Ben and Hogan made their escape through the trees, darting from shadow to shadow. Ben felt his foot nudge a body on the ground, looked down and saw it was Waylon Roque.
The sheriff had managed to crawl some way from where he’d been shot. He was still alive, but badly injured. A shell had hit his right shoulder. It was a mess. Ben was no surgeon, but he could tell that there wasn’t much holding Roque’s arm on except a few torn ligaments.
‘We have to move,’ Ben said. He bent down, took the sheriff’s good arm and crooked it around his neck. Roque’s teeth were gritted and the veins were standing out all over his blood-spattered face, but he was too tough to cry out in pain as Ben lifted him to his feet. Roque doggedly clung on to his shotgun with his useable hand.
Ben felt a pang of admiration for the sheriff. He was a tough old bird. He’d faced up to his fears, done his duty, done all he could to atone for his past mistakes. If he didn’t make it out of this alive, he would not have disgraced himself.
The cannon suddenly stopped firing. It seemed to have gone on for ever, but only about thirty-five or forty seconds had gone by. In that time, the woods this side of the compound had been reduced to a devastated wasteground. Very little was moving. Smoke drifted in the brightness of the lights. A couple of downed cops were groaning. Someone more badly hurt screamed in tortured agony.
The Humvee had rolled to a halt. There were raised voices and laughter from the Garretts’ men, who now began to re-emerge from their hiding places.
Ben and Hogan, supporting the injured Roque, scrambled away out of sight. Forty yards diagonally across from the stationary Humvee, a big thorn bush lay in a dark pool of shadow. Ben lowered Roque to the ground behind it. There was a lot of blood. Ben felt the sheriff’s pulse. It was weak and fluttering. He seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness.
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