Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  “Then take out the goddamn generator then. Give me something.”

  They kicked Ryan’s knees again. This had all become an exercise in pain.

  Whatever they’d just done to his arm had screwed him up big-time. The pain enveloped his entire body, from his waist to his neck. When his knees slammed into the concrete, they screamed, too, but there comes a point where a little more pain stops mattering.

  In front of him, the masked crowd cheered. He could feel their hatred, taste their desire to hurt him. This was it. This was the end.

  And he was too wiped out to do anything about it.

  The asshole leader in the black gown called, “Brother Zebediah!” and another asshole in a black gown stepped forward. The leader handed Brother Zebediah the knife. The crowd somehow grew even louder. “You do it,” the leader said.

  Brother Zebediah said, “Thank you, Brother Michael.”

  The executioner held the knife up for the crowd to cheer. Ryan felt a hand on his head, and suddenly it felt as if someone were using his hair to pull his scalp off his skull. He tried to stand against the strain, but someone planted his foot in the crook of his knee, effectively nailing him to the floor.

  Brother Zebediah pulled back and down on his fistful of hair, and Ryan found himself staring at the sky.

  His mother screamed.

  The knife flashed against the blinding, artificial light. He saw it shift in the executioner’s hand and he saw it come down.

  Blood sprayed everywhere.

  And then it was dark.

  “I’ve got him,” Jonathan said into his mike.

  The shot materialized because some tall guy turned to say something to the shorter guy next to him, opening a V-shaped window that exposed the executioners. Jonathan was still seventy-five feet away, but once he saw them pull the kid’s head back, he knew that all options had expired.

  He planted his feet, whipped his M4 to his shoulder, and snap-shot two rounds. The first one reduced the executioner’s head to a bloody mist, and he dropped out of sight. The second took out someone else on the stage who’d had the bad luck to stand directly behind a killer. The knife dropped out of view.

  Immediately in front of him, the kid who’d turned his head to talk dropped like a stone, too, knocked senseless by the muzzle blast and the ballistic crack of the bullets passing within two inches of his ear.

  Without hesitating, Jonathan shifted his aim two degrees to the right to take out the man who was standing on Ryan’s knees, but just as he felt the trigger break, Gail’s burst of gunfire found the generator and the world went dark. The status change startled him just enough to make him twitch, so he had no idea if he’d made the shot or not.

  It takes a human being about a second to register a frightening incident with a physical twitch, and another two seconds to process its meaning. In a crowd, reactions are slower because of so many conflicting inputs. Against experienced warriors, you’ve got about six seconds to complete an assault without counterassault. With an inexperienced cadre that is caught completely off-guard, call it ten seconds. That’s the window of opportunity for true shock and awe.

  After that, the calmer, more experienced troops will start gathering their wits and organizing their comrades. Ten or fifteen seconds after that, you’ve got a good old-fashioned firefight on your hands.

  “NVGs,” Jonathan commanded as he flipped his night-vision goggles back over his eyes. The world turned the luminescent green that was natural to him as a sunny day.

  Panic swirled around him. People yelled and pushed, stumbling over themselves and each other to get to safety. They buffeted Jonathan, but they were nowhere on his radar. He had his sights on the people on the stage, where the panic was every bit as alive as it was on the ground.

  “How you doin’, Big Guy?” he asked.

  “I’m right behind you, but I think the crowd is catching on.”

  Just as the words left his mouth, someone yelled, “That’s them! Gun!”

  This was bad news of the first order.

  CHAPTER TWENTY – NINE

  Jonathan ignored the provocative words and kept his eyes on the stage. That was his mission. PC-One and PC-Two were both still in his field of vision.

  “Big Guy, how much trouble are we in?”

  “Too much. They see us. They’re pointing.”

  “Take care of it,” he said. Up on the stage, PC-Two-Christyne-lunged for her son, but her guards restrained her. One of them produced a pistol from under his garment, and Jonathan shot him. Then, for good measure, he shot the other guard, too.

  The yelling got louder.

  Someone blindsided him from the left, throwing a punch that landed mostly on Jonathan’s ear. The blow knocked him off balance and skewed his NVGs. The follow-up punch knocked him to the ground. He fell on his ruck, and as he switched his grip on his rifle to repel the threat, three three-round bursts of automatic weapons fire split the night. The attacker and several revelers near him dropped instantly, and the crowd stampeded. Jonathan cast a glance to his left and was entirely unsurprised to Boxers standing there in a shooter’s crouch, rifle still pressed to his shoulder.

  Jonathan found his feet and refocused on the stage.

  He figured they were fifteen seconds into their assault, and the enemy had already figured out the plan and calculated the stakes. The man whom Jonathan had tried to shoot when the lights went out was in fact still alive, and he’d grabbed Ryan Nasbe over one shoulder and under the other, and was using him as a shield as he hurried toward the end of the stage. The guy’s situational awareness was perfect, keeping the boy at exactly the right angle to prevent him from being shot.

  “Big Guy, PC-Two is yours.” Jonathan hated people who hurt children.

  When Christyne saw the sheet of blood down the front of Ryan’s shroud, she knew beyond doubt that he was dead. Her scream froze in her throat as her heart froze in her chest. This was too much. It was too horrible, too The last thing she saw as the world went dark was a look of utter confusion on her son’s face.

  She lunged to help him as he disappeared into the darkness, but her captors held strong. To her right, a captor yelled, “Weapons out!” and then he made a sound that was half cough, half bark, and he fell heavily on the floor. The instant she heard a gunshot, something hot and wet splashed her, and the guard on her left dropped to the ground. She was free.

  In the silver unreality of the starlight, she could make out the developing pandemonium as people on the stage scrambled for cover. Ryan was in the melee somewhere, but she didn’t know where. He yelled again in pain. Such a recognizable sound, it rose above everything else. Everyone else.

  Guns materialized out of nowhere, and people waved them about. More shots rang out, and the two people closest to her fell dead. Across the stage, she saw others fall as well.

  She needed to get to Ryan. Once a center of attention, she now seemed irrelevant to the crowd, as they swarmed in panic. Everyone wanted off the porch now. Some raced inside the assembly hall, but most scattered into the night.

  Where was her son? Where was her boy? Just seconds ago, he’d been right there, and now, there was no sign of him. She started that direction, but then her way was blocked by the most enormous person she’d ever seen. Tall and wide and dressed in black, his body dripped with weaponry, and his face was covered with a night-vision array.

  “Christyne Nasbe,” he said. “I’m a friend of Boomer’s and we’re here to take you home. Stay with me.”

  With that, he hooked her neck with his arm, pushed her to the floor, and opened fire on the crowd nearest them. People screamed and bodies dropped.

  “Ryan!” she yelled-grunted, really, under the weight of what felt like the man’s knee in her back. “I have to get-”

  “He’s being taken care of,” the big man said. “He’s in good hands. So are you.”

  He rose to a crouch and wrapped his left arm under her shoulder. The hardware around his chest scraped her frozen flesh and she
yelped against the pain, but there would be no wriggling from this man’s grasp. When he stood, her feet left the floor.

  Wherever he was going, she was going, too.

  Jonathan killed anyone he saw brandishing a weapon. Running was fine, cowering was fine. Standing like a deer in the headlights was fine, too, and he saw a lot of all three strategies amid the panic he had created.

  The others made their choices and paid the price. He liked to think that their example showed others what not to do. The fewer the guns, the greater his advantage.

  He’d lost track of his precious cargo in all the confusion. He saw the man carrying Ryan step down off the left-hand side of the stage, but then the crowd swallowed them. Burdened as he was with a human shield, though, the bad guy couldn’t have gotten far. With a compass point to head for, Jonathan pressed forward.

  When he heard Boxers telling Christyne through his open mike that Ryan was in good hands, he resisted the urge to correct him. He would be, soon enough.

  “Ryan Nasbe!” Jonathan bellowed to the night. “Ryan Nasbe, shout out! I’m here to take you home!”

  The people nearest him jumped at the sound of his voice and two of them made threatening gestures, planting their feet for a fight. Jonathan assessed the hazard as low. “Take off, boys,” he said. “You don’t want to die tonight.”

  They backed away.

  “Ryan!”

  Jonathan continued striding into the crowd. With enough weapons, and a certain bearing, people readily get out of your way. They comply with your commands. It’s the reason why SWAT teams wear scary-looking clothes. Dispelling violence-or creating it-is as much a psychological exercise as it is a physical one, and Jonathan had The Walk down to a science. People parted from his path as if he were equipped with a railroad cowcatcher.

  “Ryan Nasbe! Shout out, son!”

  In his mind, Jonathan tried to calculate how many targets were out here. If someone told him the crowd numbered two hundred, he would not have been shocked. He was just gratified that they were mostly in retreat. That couldn’t last, though. Sooner or later, someone in charge was going to rally them.

  “Ryan! I’m here to help you! I’m here to take you home!”

  Then, from Building Alpha’s green side, ahead and to the left, he heard the words he’d been waiting for: “I’m over here!”

  At about a hundred fifty-five pounds, Ryan wasn’t the heaviest kid on the planet, but from the way this guy picked him up and used him as a shield, you’d’ve thought he weighed nothing at all. Ryan tried yelling and he tried kicking, but nothing he did loosened the man’s grip, and everything he did made his broken arm scream.

  The whole world was screaming, in fact, literally and figuratively. Through the blast of noise, above the din of the shouting and the gunfire, he heard his mother crying out for him. He cried out to answer her, but he didn’t think that his voice cut through enough to be heard.

  “This isn’t my fault!” Ryan yelled, begging his captor for mercy. “I didn’t do this.”

  “Shut up,” the man said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I said shut up!” His grip tightened around Ryan’s chest enough that he had a hard time breathing.

  They’d just reached the corner of the building and turned right to head toward the back of the house when he heard a voice yell, “Ryan Nasbe! Shout out! I’m here to take you home!”

  His captor must have heard it, too, because his grip turned pythonlike, squeezing so tightly that Ryan couldn’t move air in or out.

  This is bullshit, he thought. This was the moment. He’d already messed up his first chance to get away; he wasn’t going to let something as transient and insignificant as pain ruin his second shot at freedom.

  Live or die, this was the time.

  Kicking his legs at the air and tossing his head and his good arm, he wriggled like a grounded fish, making himself impossible to hold on to.

  “Stop that!” the man commanded as he stopped and grabbed him with both arms in a futile effort to control him.

  Ryan heard his name called out a second time, just as he felt his captor losing his grip.

  “I’m over here!” he shouted. His voice broke with the effort and rose an octave, but man, was it loud. “On the side of the building! Over here!”

  As he slipped through, his captor lost his grip on everything but the boy’s bad arm. “Shut up, kid.” He tried lifting him by the arm again.

  Ryan howled. “The left side of the building!”

  Up ahead, at the edge of the shadow, he saw the silhouette of what could only be his dad. He had the night vision and the vest, and he had a rifle at his shoulder.

  “Here!” Ryan yelled as he fell to the ground.

  Gail’s bursts of gunfire had brought instant darkness and panic. From back here, from this elevation, she witnessed the pandemonium. People were running everywhere. The NVGs erased a lot of detail, but muzzle flashes popped right out. From their location, and from the results-bad guys falling down-she figured that her team must be winning.

  When she saw Boxers bolt onto the stage and cover PC-Two, she knew it was time for her to get back to work.

  She slid on her butt down the windshield onto the hood, and from there darted around to the driver’s door. She slammed it shut, adjusted the seat-nothing last driven by the Big Guy could be driven by anyone else without adjustment-and dropped the transmission into gear.

  The plan was simple. The guys would seek primary shelter inside the armored walls of Building Alpha, but only long enough for her to drive around to the back, and then they’d get the hell out of there.

  How they were going to do that without being torn apart by superior numbers was a little fuzzy, but a plan is a plan. In dynamic situations like this, plans were little more than fantasies, anyway-pictures in your head of how things would go if everyone else played their parts perfectly.

  She hit the gas hard to get ahead of the wave of fleeing Klansmen, or whatever the hell they were, and pointed the nose of the truck down the red side of the building.

  She was too late. She hadn’t yet driven fifty feet before the leading elements of the fleeing terrorists caught up with her.

  She hit the brakes hard to keep from running over one of them, and that proved to be her big mistake.

  “It’s one of the shooters!” someone yelled, and then they swarmed the vehicle. In an instant, they were everywhere. Two of them climbed onto the hood, and God only knows how many climbed onto the flatbed. They stomped at the hood and the windshield, rocking the vehicle violently on all axes of motion.

  “Gunslinger’s in trouble,” she said on the net. “They’ve got me in my vehicle.”

  She stomped on the gas again. The wheels spun in the gravel, and as the truck slid sideways, the attackers on the hood and the roof went flying. But the additional two thousand pounds of humanity in the flatbed made the truck sluggish to respond.

  Gail dropped the transmission from Drive to Low for the extra torque, and it helped for a second or two.

  In her ear, Boxers’ voice said, “PC-Two is in hand, we’re going to Alpha.”

  Then the glass in her door erupted in on her, showering her with ragged beads that bloodied the side of her head. Someone pulled her NVGs from her head.

  Hands reached through the opening and grabbed the wheel, cranking it hard to the left.

  She pressed harder on the gas, but with the wheels turned so acutely, the rest was inevitable.

  The centrifugal force flipped the vehicle to its side. Just before she lost her grip on the wheel and was thrown across the cab into the inside of the passenger door, she radioed, “They’ve got me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jonathan saw the man torturing the boy, but there was too much movement for a clear shot.

  “Gunslinger’s in trouble. They’ve got me in my vehicle.”

  Jonathan’s heart skipped. He threw a glance over his right shoulder, to where Gail had to be, but all he saw wa
s the crowd of bad guys.

  “PC-Two is in hand,” he heard Boxers say. “We’re going to Alpha.”

  When he looked back down the green side, the torturer had let the kid drop and was already disappearing around the corner to the black side of Alpha. His distraction with Gail had let his moment to shoot evaporate.

  “They’ve got me.”

  Jonathan cursed under his breath.

  And he turned his back on Gail. He had a job to do. This mission was first and foremost about the Nasbes. Once he had them secure, he could start worrying about the team. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.

  With his weapon pressed against his shoulder, he made his way down the side of the building to the boy. “Ryan Nasbe,” he said.

  The kid looked confused. “You’re not my dad.”

  “No, I’m not,” Jonathan said. “But I sure could use his assistance right now. Can you walk?”

  He was already rising to his feet. “My arm’s broken.”

  “Then I promise I won’t make you walk on your hands. Stick very, very close to me.”

  In his ear, her heard all kinds of commotion as people grabbed Gail and pulled her out of the pickup. It filled the airwaves.

  “Who are you?” Ryan asked.

  The distraction of Gail’s capture unnerved him. It would unnerve all of them. He switched his radio to push-to-talk. “Big Guy and Mother Hen, switch to channel two and PTT. Mother Hen, continue to monitor channel one. Hang tough, Gunslinger. We’ll come and get you soon.” The words hurt his stomach. Gail was on her own.

  “Are you talking to me?” Ryan asked.

  Jonathan placed a protective arm around the kid. “Scorpion on channel two. PC-One in hand, on our way to Alpha.”

  The words had barely cleared throat when he heard intense gunfire from inside the building.

  “We’ve got bad guys in Alpha,” Boxers said on channel two. Another burst of gunfire followed his words.

  To Jonathan’s ear, they all sounded like rifles. Five-five-six millimeter, if he wasn’t mistaken, and some were set on full-auto.