"You swear it?"
Jeff frowned. "I don't have to swear it, I'm your boss." Then he smiled. "But yeah, I swear to God there will be people looking into this, and when they get to the bottom of it, you'll know. Now go spend a nice couple of paid days off relaxing with your wife. That's an order, buddy."
"Aye, sir," Matt said, and walked out.
Chapter 12
He grabbed the mail on the way into the house, shuffling through bills and junk mail and stopping at a large manila envelope from Herr Gottschalk in Dresden. He set the rest of the mail on the deck, leaned against the rail, and tore open the envelope.
He pulled out Gottschalk's business card and a scanned, black-and-white photograph. Nine men stood under a giant swastika circled with German words, the enameled frieze from the stairwell to the Dresden bunker. Circled in red marker, a young man in a windbreaker smiled, one hand in his pocket, the other on the shoulder of the man next to him. With his light hair and dark eyes, he had to be Brian Frahm's grandfather. They could have been twins.
Gottschalk hadn't circled the text beneath the photo. "Joint British-American archeological team, Dresden, Germany, 1958. Photo by Tom Hannes." On the back in severe block letters, Gottschalk had written, "I knew he looked familiar. Uncanny!" Matt frowned, stuffed the photo and envelope in his back pocket, and walked inside.
He stepped through the door, scooped up Ted, and sat down on the couch next to Monica. They chatted about nothings in front of Family Guy reruns—Bartell's public nuisance hearing, the new cheese counter at the grocery store, winter greens from the farmer's market. He let her presence soothe him into something that resembled but wasn't peace of mind, closed his eyes on an enthusiastic giggity and let sleep take him. He woke to the squeak of the deck stair, followed by a strange rumble.
The TV had died. In the pitch black Ted growled again—he'd never done that before—and Monica stretched, groggy. "Is the power out?" The black-and-white ultraviolet mingled with the green infrared background of the house's ambient warmth. The heat registers glowed a modest, fading orange.
"Looks like it," he said, and leaned in close to whisper in her ear. "Something's wrong. Get the shotgun and lock the door. But go easy."
Her eyes glinted in the moonlight, full of worry. She swallowed, then sat up. "I'm going to bed," she said with too much theater. She stretched on her way to the bedroom, hamming it all the way. Ted followed her, still growling, his tail between his legs. Matt followed her, cutting into the bathroom with feigned nonchalance. He didn't turn on the light.
He ran the sink, flushed the toilet, and used the noise to cover his movements. He pulled the .45 ACP from the holster taped under the sink and chambered a round. His late Uncle Jon's model 1911 from Vietnam, a reliable handgun that had never been fired at another human being. He grabbed both spare box magazines and stuffed them into his back pocket, then closed his eyes and listened.
Faint scratches at the deck door. Frantic barking from the bedroom. "Ted, shut up!" Monica yelled, real fear creeping into her fake annoyance.
He eased the door open and looked at their wedding photo in a gold-painted frame on the wall. It held the only place he'd seen Monica's defiant, "bring it on, world" confidence in a long while, and while circumstance had shattered her, she'd been recovering for years and he loved her more than ever. In the fuzzy IR reflection at least two figures crouched on the deck. He held his breath as they picked the lock. The door slid open, and they stepped into the kitchen.
Matt rounded the corner pistol-first and pulled the trigger. The gun roared, and Matt's vision hazed blue in the afterimage. The first shape crumpled as a double-tap took him in the chest. The second staggered backward and fell off the railing, hot blood spraying orange in the infra-red spectrum. Matt dove through the doorway, snatched the fallen man's suppressed REC7 on his way, and rolled off the deck. A suppressed assault rifle chuffed as he hit the ground, bullets tearing through the underbrush.
As he stood, the second commando gasped for breath behind a pair of night-vision goggles, hot red blood leaking through his body armor. Matt crushed his trachea with a brutal stomp, then snatched a pair of grenades from his bandoleer. With an annoyed, curious grunt he pulled the autoinjector from the man's belt and stuffed it into his pocket. He pulled the pin on one of the grenades and tossed it at the oak by the corner of the house. It bounced off of the trunk and out of sight. The explosion shattered the front windows. Someone yelled for his mom in an anguish-filled voice.
The whispers gibbered their murderous nonsense as he circled around the deck. The screaming man's left leg lay three feet from the rest of him, and steaming liquid gushed from ravaged arteries. The iron tang of blood mingled with the earthy smell of gunpowder. Matt shot him center-of-mass, then choked up the REC7 and fired another burst into the house. Bullets tore through a man that leaned around the wall, and the grenade dropped from his hands.
"Pomegranate!" someone yelled. Another burst dropped a man as he fled for the counter, and Matt shot yet another in the thigh as he turned to run. The man stumbled to his knees next to the grenade, cried out as he scrambled for it, and blew sideways in a spray of shrapnel. His weapon scattered across the floor, some kind of strange air gun.
Matt picked it up and pulled back the breach. He caught the small canister as it ejected, a light metal object with a needle on the front. The serial number engraved on the bottom sifted through Matt's mind and landed on its significance: level-six muscle enhancement. If the needle hit him, he'd bonk in minutes at most. He tossed it across the floor, tore out the magazine and stuffed it into his pocket, and kinked the barrel over his knee.
He crouched and looked for movement, taking the time to reload from a dead man's bandoleer. Six dead and not one of them augged. He unscrewed the suppressor from the REC7. Except for the aug gun, they used standard ICAP issue, and the man who yelled "pomegranate" had to be either French or French Canadian. Assuming standard tactical doctrine, there were four left in the squad, and at least one more squad on standby. The whispers clawed at his mind, an orgy of desperate bloodshed.
Monica crouched beside the bed, the shotgun trained at the door. Her hands shook, and her lips stretched in a thin line. Ted cowered under the bed as the window exploded inward. She screamed.
Matt shook off the premonition and charged the house. He grunted in pain as a bullet punched through his abdomen, and threw the last grenade left-handed into the living room. Monica screamed as glass shattered in the bedroom, a full five seconds after Matt had seen it. Their shotgun roared even as the grenade went off behind him. He hit the door with his shoulder, splintering it around the lock and catapulting into the room.
A commando sprawled on the floor, his head leaking bright orange in the infrared spectrum, a REC7 on the floor next to him. Ted snarled and worried at his ankle. A second man wrenched Monica's head back by her hair, pressing a black pistol to her neck. A third crouched behind the bed, his assault rifle trained on Matt's center of mass. The shotgun lay on the floor.
Matt froze. Hot blood ran down his stomach, soaking his shirt and jeans. That's three, plus one in the living room. If he's alive. Neither of these men held air guns.
The man holding Monica tightened his finger on the trigger. "Drop your weapon and fold your hands on your head and she won't get hurt." His accent struck Matt as either Spanish or Portuguese.
Monica's eyes flicked downward, barely visible in the moonlight.
"Yeah," Matt said.
As she raised her arms and dropped to her knees, her assailant tried and failed to maintain his grip. Matt pulled the trigger. The three-round burst sprayed bits of bloody skull and brains onto the wall. The other man pulled the trigger. Matt snarled as the full-auto barrage caught him in the chest, shredding his lungs as he fell to the carpet.
He caught himself with one hand and sprang forward. Monica snap-kicked the man in the face, tearing off his goggles. She kicked him again as he rebounded off the wall. Coughing blood, Matt fell on the
shotgun and choked it up. The man's eyes widened as he looked down the barrel. "Non!" he cried.
Matt jammed it into his throat and pulled the trigger, then rolled over, training the gun on the door.
His chest itched, and his breath came in wheezes. He tried to talk and couldn't.
"You okay?" Monica asked.
He nodded, then gestured at the shattered window. As he reloaded the shotgun, she busted out the rest of the glass with her fist, draped a pillow over the sill, and clambered out. He handed the weapon out the window, then picked up Ted and passed him through, gritting his teeth against the agony in his chest. He coughed blood as he dragged himself through and fell to the ground five feet below.
"Walker's," he gasped, standing.
She nodded and whispered to the Bassett. "Ted, heel."
They crept through the woods toward Aaron Walker's tree farm. The old man raised eighty acres of Christmas trees and shipped them across the United States. He once bragged about supplying the White House, and sometimes Rockefeller Center. The story changed based on how much he'd had to drink and whether or not his wife heard it and called him a liar. More importantly, he drove a '92 Dodge pickup and kept the keys in the cab.
Freezing dew soaked through Matt's blood-spattered socks. He looked down at Monica's bare feet and impotent rage consumed him, washing out even the burning itch of his lungs stitching back together. A man who can't protect his family is no man at all. Someone shouted behind them, guttural French carrying through the woods. No radio? Matt thought.
He pulled Monica behind a small conifer, kissed her, and leaned in so that his lips almost touched her ear. "Get to the truck," he whispered while reattaching the suppressor to the front of the assault rifle. "Make sure the keys are in it, but don't start it. And don't close the door. Be as quiet as you can." He pulled back and looked into her blue eyes, irises almost black in the moonlight. His heart tore with pride at the determined, fierce look.
She licked her lips, touched them with her fingertips, and looked at them in the moonlight. "You're bleeding."
He took a full breath and didn't want to scream. A good sign. "I know. But I'll be fine. Now go."
She nodded once, scooped up the dog, and took off at a silent trot.
His eyes traced the heat signature of her bare feet on the grass, fading in the cold dew but not fast enough. He bolted across the open space between the tree line and the barn, lifted the latch and heaved open the door. The hinges squeaked, and Buster started baying from inside Walker's house. The collie would bark at anything and everything, and even nothing at all. C'mon, Ted, stay quiet. A good dog by nature, obedience classes had reinforced his desire to please, but he could be headstrong when he wanted to and liked to join the chorus. Nobody who owned a Basset hound would accuse them of being smart.
The horses whickered and stomped as he pulled open their stalls, and Walker's three goats bleated in agitation. Once freed they milled about in confused sleepiness, except for the pony he'd harnessed and secured with a loop to the hitching post just inside the entrance. Ducking to the back of the barn, he pulled the pin on a grenade and dropped it in the cistern, then heaved himself up and over the hay loft. The bang shattered his eardrums, and the animals panicked. He dropped to the floor and followed their mad dash into the darkness outside, pulling the pony with him.
Two horses scattered into the lines of trees, and he led his pony after them, masking his heat signature on the line of approach from his house. Someone muttered off to the right—he caught "pourquoi" and "l'animaux" and nothing else. He dropped to one knee and let off two tight bursts, the second louder than the first. Suppressor's failing. He led the horse over to the bodies of the two men, swapped his weapon for one of theirs, and refilled his bandoleer with grenades.
He turned just as a third man rounded a thicket, air gun raised. Matt stepped forward and knocked the barrel to the side as it spat certain madness, and the commando struck him twice in the torso. Matt smiled as the taut wall of muscle absorbed the blows, then head-butted his opponent square in the face. His skull crunched as it caved in, but Matt wasted no time on satisfaction. He closed his grip on the barrel and rounded the shrub, swinging the weapon like a baseball bat. The collapsible metal stock caught the hiding man in the neck, and a geyser of hot blood sprayed from his shredded carotid artery.
As the man's life pumped onto the ground, Matt scanned the tree line. Behind him, Buster's high-pitched, rolling howl got louder, and a screen door banged closed. In front of him, nothing moved in the darkness. If the other six were out there, they had thermal camouflage. He crouched, bent the barrels of both weapons, and listened.
A throaty rumble rose in the darkness. Helicopter. He ran for Aaron's truck as Buster made a fantastic ruckus trying to herd the panicky animals toward the barn, bounding through the grass, tail wagging in unfettered glee. Matt jumped behind the wheel as a shotgun blast roared into the air from the porch.
"Hey!" Aaron hollered. "You get out of there!" Walker cocked the gun for effect.
Matt yelled back. "Aaron, get inside and stay there. Don't come out until the cops show up, not for anything. Go!" As the sounds of the rotors got louder, Matt took heart that they had a higher pitch than a typical ICAP transport.
Aaron's brow furrowed, but he lowered the gun. "Matt? That you?"
Matt waved, jammed the stick into drive, and hit the gas. "Sorry!" he yelled over the gravel-spitting tires. He accelerated through the trees as Monica cradled a whimpering Ted.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the darkness. "Jeez, babe, you're going to kill us."
"I can see fine," he said, shifting into fourth. Just hope I don't hit anything. He left the lights off. The black-and-white UV overlay helped him drive, and at this speed his mind flooded with precognitive images of countless crashes, which he avoided without slowing down. He bounced through the creek into McMullen's field and ploughed a line straight through the dry feed corn.
"I think I'm going to be sick," Monica said as he veered around the towering oak in the middle of the field, then jerked a hard right to avoid an ancient harvester hidden by the faded yellow stalks.
"Sorry," he said. "Are you hurt?"
She shook her head but threw up before she could get the window down, filling the car with the acrid smell of bile and half-digested macaroni and cheese. Ted whined and licked her face, but she didn't open her eyes. They broke the tree line and barreled through pine boughs, the old growth cut high by generations of McMullen hunters. He risked a glance up and saw nothing but trees, then gritted his teeth as the front right tire hit a large root, bashing his head into the ceiling. The truck veered, tilted, and then came back down on four wheels.
He exhaled a sigh of relief and jammed his foot on the brake. The truck careened to a stop just in front of an ancient pine, one that Matt had used in his pre-ICAP days for a hunter's stand. Monica looked at him with wide, bloodshot eyes. "Why are we stopping?"
"That chopper can't see us through the trees," he said, "but they sure as hell know where we went. I think from here I can find the north road, but we've got gullies funneling us. They're sure to have a map, so can figure out where we're going." He killed the engine. "Wait here."
He heard her Wait, what? before she said it and had climbed ten feet up the tree before it left her mouth. The bulky REC7 made it hard to climb, but at least he could breathe again. Thirty feet up, the trees broke enough that he could see stars, and the distant thrum of the helicopter closed in. The sound echoed through the mountains, so he couldn't tell what direction it would come from. If they were smart, they’d circle around to catch them as they exited the far side of the dense pines.
He trained the assault rifle on an empty piece of sky and sucked in a lungful of freezing air. He let it out and took another, happy with his lung function. He frowned. Two squads of commandoes would be massive overkill against a normal threat, and inadequate to the point of stupidity for an aug. But those air guns . . . they were something ne
w. He could only think of one reason to shoot massive doses of GS Augs at a person, and the thought filled him with rage. They wanted me to bonk, to kill my wife, Ted, my neighbors, so they could put me down like a dog and no one would be the wiser. He wondered how many agents had fallen the same way and how many people knew about it.
The thudding rotors grew much louder, and Matt forced all stressful thoughts from his mind. He had to relax. He wouldn't get much of a shot, and it had to count. This wasn't the movies, where a good hit to the gas tank would take—There! The clear heat signature confirmed his hopes: ICAP used US Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and their standard "Black Hole" infrared suppression system would have muddied his vision. This civilian craft had four or five seats and wouldn't have armor or, hopefully, a bullet-proof canopy.
Matt tried to work through the ramifications as the chopper circled closer. No augs, wrong helicopter, radio silence. But they used ICAP issue and doctrines. He breathed out, listened to the whispers gibber their incoherent bloodlust, then pulled the trigger. He fired the second burst a quarter-second later, just to the left of the first. As the glass canopy cracked, the pilot jinked, putting his center of mass right in line with the second volley. The pilot twitched and jittered, and the chopper dropped into a death-spiral.
Matt heard the impact before he reached the ground, skinning his hands on the rough bark. Monica still sat in the truck, upright and rigid, Ted on her lap. Matt got in and wrinkled his nose at the smell, impossibly even worse than before.
"Ted piddled," Monica said, her voice cracking with stress.
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