72 Hours (A Thriller)

by Moreton, William Casey

  Archer brought his head to the surface, sighted down the Beretta, and ripped off two more consecutive rounds, drilling Foxtrot once in the chest and once in the meat of his left shoulder.

  Foxtrot pin-wheeled with the force of the hits, spun to his right, his HK417 discharging a burst of half a dozen rounds at nothing in particular.

  Archer heard him cry out, even as the bang of the Beretta rang in his ears.

  Foxtrot had fallen away from the gap at the top of the canyon.

  Archer used the window between exchanges of gunfire to his advantage. He ran his hand over the dead man’s Kevlar vest and tore a single grenade from a pouch of heavy nylon webbing.

  An instant later the mercenary stitched a barrage of bullets in a zigzag pattern across the surface of the rushing water.

  Archer pulled the pin with his teeth, then leaned out over the water current and heaved the grenade straight up between the walls.

  The grenade sailed up through the rift in the rock, grazed the limestone at the rim of the wall, and rose up about six inches above the canyon opening before stalling in midair. At the instant its momentum ceased, it detonated.

  Foxtrot never saw it coming. The grenade exploded less than four feet from his legs. He was blown apart. Archer turned his head and shielded his face with his arms. Falling rock and debris splashed all around him, sharp, fragmented corners and razor-like angles catching him, cutting and bruising. Archer pushed off the limestone wall with his legs and allowed the current to haul him downstream. He drifted through the winding canyon, soaked and cold. At the mouth of the canyon he hauled himself up into the dirt and brush. He was banged up and bleeding but alive. Two more dead, he thought.

  Five down.

  CHAPTER 98

  The metal button depressed with a stiff pop. Ramey held her fist against it, not daring to let up. The ominous orange light continued to pulse. She cut her eyes toward the metal staircase leading up out of the room.

  Wyatt looked on in wide-eyed wonder and fear.

  For two long seconds nothing happened.

  Ramey’s stomach dropped.

  Then they heard the electric motor bang and hum. There was a loud squeal as gears and pumps rattled to life. There was a chill-inducing shudder that jolted through the entire room. And then a massive slab of steel dropped smoothly into place, slamming down, covering the doorway, sealing them off from the rest of the world. The bottom edge of the slab door sank down several inches below floor-level so that nothing could be used to leverage it open. The electric motor groaned like a banshee, then fell silent.

  The orange light dimmed and then ceased pulsing so that children were bathed in its steady orange glow. Silence settled over them. They stared at the door for what seemed like forever.

  Neither of them spoke.

  * * *

  Lindsay heard the steel door crash into place. A burst of gunfire raked across a wall a few feet from her face.

  She screamed and instinctively raised the Kimber and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in her hand. She fired the shot blindly. The blast rang boldly through the corridor. She screamed again, the pistol quaking wildly in her trembling hand.

  Then she turned and ran. Ran hard through the stark blackness. Ran without thinking.

  She slammed from wall to wall, dodging blindly from one corridor to the next, bursts of automatic gunfire pulverizing the walls and ceiling five or six steps behind. She collided hard with the corner of a wall and the Kimber jolted loose from her hand, skittering out of sight and out of reach into the darkness. She’d lost the radio and now the gun. Her only remaining defense was to run.

  She spun away from the hard edge of the concrete corner and flung herself into the next dark open space.

  “Stop!” the man shouted somewhere behind her. “You can’t escape! It’s over!”

  Lindsay screamed involuntarily, a desperate yelp. She didn’t dare slow down.

  He fired again. A burst of muzzle flash briefly lighting the low ceiling of the corridor.

  “There’s nowhere to run!” his huge voice roared. “It’s time for you to die, Lindsay!”

  Oh my God, they know my name!

  “It’s over!” he said. “You can’t win!”

  She sprinted through the darkness, lost inside the maze of corridors and rooms. She clipped a doorjamb with her right shoulder and spun through the open doorway. She scrambled on her hands and knees and pushed the door closed behind her. It banged shut. She slapped the doorknob where she believed a lock should be and heard it click. Then she scrambled away from the door on her backside, out of breath, heart racing, tears streaming down her face.

  Tango’s heavy boots pounded down the corridor and stopped outside the door.

  Lindsay clamped her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming.

  “Lindsay?” he said.

  He tested the doorknob. Locked.

  “It’s over, Lindsay. There’s nowhere left to run.”

  Lindsay backpedaled, silently propelling herself across the room on her rear-end. She felt a rug beneath her bunch up and slide as she pushed against it. It occurred to her that she was in the library. She vaguely remembered the big rug sprawled on the floor in front of the cheap sofa and the stacks of books. It gave her some frame of reference but did her very little good.

  She heard a burst of gunfire outside the door, the bullets ringing against the metal sheathing. Sooner or later he would blow the lock off. And all she could do was sit and wait.

  She pushed the rug further out of the way and the floor suddenly felt hollow beneath her. She patted it with the palm of her hand. There was a metal plate beneath her. A rectangle of cool metal cut into the concrete floor.

  She scrambled onto her knees and brushed the rug aside. She felt along the surface of the plate, probing with her fingertips. Toward the center of one end she found what she’d been hoping for. A narrow groove intended as a hand pull.

  Tango shot the door again, kicking at it with the sturdy heel of his boot.

  Lindsay knew the door couldn’t hold for much longer.

  She lifted the panel, praying it was more than just an access to the power grid or storage or a weapons cache. The panel opened easily enough, but she couldn’t see a thing. There was nothing beneath her but empty space. She sat at the edge of the drop and extended her legs down. There seemed to be no evidence of a ladder or handholds. Cool air hissed up from the dark, open cavity. It smelled of fiberglass insulation and dust.

  The commotion outside the library door suddenly fell silent. An eerie moment of stillness. She sat with her legs dangling into the open hatch and turned her head. She could see only a thin strip of illumination from the tactical light on his gun glowing in the gap beneath the door. She couldn’t hear him but knew he was still there.

  Her stomach twisted. She held the hatch panel with the flat of her hand as she cautiously lowered herself into the hole. Her feet didn’t touch bottom. As far as she knew, she could be about to drop into the center of the earth.

  Then she heard Tango press something against the outside of the library door, and heard the stomping of his heavy boots retreating down the corridor to take cover. Her time had run out. She ducked her head and let go of the edge. The hatch panel clanged shut above her as she dropped into darkness.

  Then the library door exploded.

  CHAPTER 99

  Archer knew that the remaining mercenaries surely had to have heard the grenade explode at the slot canyon. They would want to know what had happened and who was involved. He heard one of them calling over the radio to their team lead. The team lead didn’t answer.

  “Team Lead – Alpha, do you copy?” the call went out again, and again no reply.

  “Foxtrot, do you copy?” the same voice said.

  Foxtrot didn’t answer.

  Archer filed two more names into memory. Alpha and Foxtrot.

  He was pleased. The team lead was apparently among the dead. Either from a knife in the ear or a grenade in the f
ace. He wanted them to panic as their numbers dwindled. He wanted insecurity to set in. He wanted each of them to come to the realization that as long as they continued to pursue the individual he was charged with protecting, they were going to die, one by one.

  * * *

  Oscar and Kilo had indeed seen the flash from the explosion at the slot canyon from their positions along the meandering route up the ridgeline. It stopped them cold. They hunkered down in the brush and got on the radio for a head count. No report from Alpha or Foxtrot. They glassed the folds between the ridges and observed no movement. They had seen the flash, heard the rumble, felt the slight tremor. But now there was only the rain and crackle of thunder. So they continued the uphill march toward the sniper’s nest.

  CHAPTER 100

  The first few drops of rain had begun to fall at the roadside motel on a lonely stretch of Nevada interstate. The sign by the roadside advertised vacancies, and judging by the sparse half-dozen vehicles sprinkled across the parking lot, the vacancies were plentiful. The rain moved in slowly, patiently. The first few drops fell on the dusty windshield of the little Kia minivan and lazily streaked down the slope of the glass.

  The Kia was parked in the last slot at the far end of the motel, the furthest point from the office. It sat in the cool stillness of the early morning. The engine was still ticking.

  Penny Lockwood lay on her side on the narrow bed in room 51, curled in the fetal position, her wrists secured to the headboard by a plastic zip-tie. She lay on the side of the bed with her head resting on her outstretched arm, eyes open, staring vacantly at the drapes closed over the window.

  Noella Chu was seated on the other side of the bed. She dialed the number again from the clunky touch-tone telephone of the bedside table. No answer.

  She was 99% certain she had spoken to Lindsay Hammond earlier, and was now 99% certain that Lindsay Hammond had been taken by Ryan Archer to some isolated place in the desert to be hidden and protected by Penny Lockwood’s two brothers. All of which made Noella Chu 100% confident she would find them and finish the job at some point in the next eight hours and walk away with the money.

  * * *

  The explosion ripped the door off its hinges. Shredded it to confetti and sent it flailing. Blew a crater through the concrete walls on either side. It sent a dust cloud of debris rocketing down either end of the corridor, a veil of dust and smoke rolling through the claustrophobic darkness. Hunks of concrete were propelled like shrapnel. The walls shook. The floor shook. The blast opened the wall opposite the library door, exposing plumbing and copper tubing and ductwork sheathed in insulation.

  Debris and dust settled slowly to the ground. Fluttering grit and metal and wood fiber fell like rain. Pipes previously hidden behind walls had burst, and now water was spewing through gaps in the concrete, the pressurized flow hissing out onto the walls and ceiling and floor. Steam swirled and billowed from pipes transporting hot water from one room to another. The lights flickered, the fluorescent tubes thirsty to receive a steady electrical current.

  Tango eased to his feet. He crunched over grit and cautiously turned the corner. There was no visibility. The air was totally saturated with dust and smoke and steam. Tango turned his face away and gave the cloud a few minutes to dissipate and settle. Then he swung the tactical light through the gloom and crunched through the hole he had made in the wall.

  The library was wrecked. Bits of shredded paper spun down like a funnel and fluttered in the beam of the tactical light. The furniture had been twisted and mashed by the blast. Bookshelves had been sheered cleanly off the walls. The long fluorescent light fixture mounted to the ceiling now hung limply from its pale white power cord, dangling and swinging, the glass tubes decimated and gone.

  Tango crunched over the grit and glass and stood over the metal panel set into the middle of the floor. He shined his light through the gloom from wall to wall, corner to corner. There was no sign of Lindsay Hammond. No corpse. No blood. It was as if she had simply disappeared.

  But Tango knew she hadn’t disappeared. She had found a way out. And now he had to go down after her.

  * * *

  Oscar and Kilo moved through the rain and slop towards the sniper’s nest. Oscar gauged the distance they’d traveled from the gnarled trees in the chaparral and calculated they had to be getting very close. They creeped through mangled brush and took shelter behind a pile of loosely arranged rocks.

  Oscar raised his rifle and scanned the remainder of the ridge. He could no longer see what he believed he’d seen earlier. He ducked his head behind the rocks and frowned at Kilo.

  Kilo raised his head to take a look.

  Oscar glanced at his watch. Because of the wind complications during the jump, they were behind schedule and now they were losing men.

  “I see nothing,” Kilo said.

  Oscar nodded.

  “Get ready,” he said. “We’re gonna take out the nest.”

  They advanced rapidly up the crown of the ridge silently with their guns raised. They arrived at the spot where Oscar believed the sniper had been positioned, but there was no one there.

  They kicked around through the brush and weeds found where the ground had been recently disturbed. Someone had been there. Sitting. Kneeling. Standing. Lying prone. Waiting. There were clear footprints pressed into the mud and trailing down off one side of the rise. They were easy to follow.

  The two mercenaries studied the scene. Someone had been there but had retreated. Very recently.

  Oscar gestured with the muzzle of his rifle.

  Kilo nodded.

  They moved like jungle cats through the brush and down through a steep washout in the muddy bank that dropped them below the crown of the ridge. The men had to use both hands to navigate the tricky path down the fifteen-foot channel of the washout. The sandstone was muddy and perilously slick. Then there was a four-foot drop-off where the slope of the washout terminated.

  Kilo was the first one out. He came down hard on his knees. He raised his head and peered out through the rain and gloom. And then his head exploded.

  His skull was reduced to a pinkish-gray mist of brain matter and blood and pulverized bone. The shot rang out like a cannon from nearly point blank range. Kilo simply slumped forward onto his empty shoulders.

  Oscar had already jumped before he heard the gunshot and couldn’t arrest his forward momentum. He came down almost on top of his dead partner and immediately heard the words, “Don’t even think about it!”

  He cut his eyes slowly to the south and saw the muzzle of the gun protruding from a bush less than three feet to his right. The muzzle was aimed and ready.

  Raj had him dead to rights.

  “Drop your weapon,” Raj ordered.

  “I know what’s going through your head right about now,” Raj said. “But remember, nothing’s going through your buddy’s head anymore. Don’t even blink.”

  Oscar raised his hands non-threateningly as he placed the rifle gently down on the ground. Rain spattered down on the synthetic composite stock.

  “Now ease away,” Raj directed.

  Oscar kept his hands visible and stepped away from the gun.

  “What else are you packing?” Raj asked.

  Oscar stared hard at him.

  “Put your sidearm on the ground,” Raj said.

  Oscar nodded with a single dip of his chin and pulled a big Springfield from a Velcro flap to one side of his chest. He held it by the barrel and placed it in the mud.

  “Nice,” Raj commented. “And now the knife.”

  The mercenary pulled a long serrated blade from a sheath strapped to his leg and cast it into the darkness.

  “Get to your feet,” Raj ordered.

  Oscar pushed slowly up off his knees with his hands in the air.

  “OK,” Raj said, circling around behind him. “Now you and I are going to take a little walk.”

  CHAPTER 101

  Archer retraced his steps. Picked his way east as thunder banged
high above the desert plain. He had lost both his knife and rifle back in the slot canyon. He knew that both of the dead mercenaries had been well armed, so he squatted next to the body of the man he had shot in the throat and relieved him of his HK417. He stood and checked the magazine. It hadn’t yet fired a single round.

  Archer shoved his Beretta down the front of his pants and ran with the rifle in one hand, the nylon sling slapping against his leg as he dodged in and out through the darkness and gloom.

  * * *

  The children huddled together in a corner of the secure room, staring at the steady orange light on the wall. They had heard the explosion and felt the low rumble as the shockwave passed through the floor and walls. They couldn’t bring themselves to speak, to utter a word. They were scared out of their minds. Scared that the men with the guns would find a way through the door and get to them. Scared that they would never see their mother alive again.

  * * *

  Archer reached the iron hatch at the bottom of the bluff. Run-off water was still pouring in. He could hear it crashing in a torrent at the base of the shaft.

  He keyed his walkie.

  “Raj, Simeon, you boys still with me?”

  “Affirmative,” Simeon answered. “I’m outside the main doors now. One of them blasted through. I’m going in for a look.”

  “Watch your step,” Archer said. “These guys shoot first and ask questions later. They know what they’re doing.”

  “So do I,” Simeon said.

  “Be careful.”

  Archer heard Raj in his ear.

  “I’m headed back your way,” Raj said. “I’ve got one of them with me. Alive.”

  “Alive?”

  “Affirmative. I left one dead and have one prisoner.”

  “So by my count that makes six dead, plus the one with you. That leaves three unaccounted for.”

  “There’s at least one inside,” Simeon said.