by Scott McEwen
“Is your mom bad off?”
“I think she’ll be okay, but once the shooting starts, this house isn’t going to stop AK-47 bullets. Even I know they’ll cut clean through one side and out the other.”
Buck crawled into the room and stood the Winchester against the wall. “You’re right. But it’s you who should go for help, honey. If you’re quick, you can make it to Chatham’s place on foot in less than an hour.”
“I don’t like the idea of going to Dusty for help. I haven’t talked to him in years.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” Buck said. “We all gotta set our differences aside.”
Over the next ten minutes, Marie very reluctantly prepared herself to go, dressing in hiking boots and Gore-Tex rain gear. She filled a CamelBak with water and strapped the Springfield .45 to her hip.
“Oso’s gonna carry on like a spoiled kid when I go, so keep him close.”
“Be sure and skirt well south before you turn east,” Buck said. “You don’t want those sons a bitches to see you, and you don’t want the boys up on the ridge mistaking you for the enemy. We’ll hold out here until you get back with the cavalry.”
She crossed the living room to a ground-level window on the far side of the house and knelt down to give Oso a hug. “You look after Grandma now,” she told him, rubbing his head.
She stood to open the window, and the Chesapeake Bay retriever began to whine, knowing she was about to leave without him. “Hold ’im, Buck, or he’ll jump right out after me.”
Buck took the dog by the collar. “You’re good to go, honey. Be careful!”
She slipped out into the rainy night, and Buck pulled down the sash. Oso ran directly to the front door and began to bark.
“She’ll be fine,” the big man said, going over and taking him by the collar. “Let’s go upstairs and look after Jan.”
Oso fought him the entire way, and with the big animal twisting around and around, it was like trying to drag the Tasmanian devil up the stairs.
“Sumbitch, you’re stubborn!” Buck stumbled on the last step.
Sensing Buck’s loss of balance, Oso jerked hard to break his grip and scrabbled down the stairs. He raced through the living room toward the back of the house and leapt out through one of the broken windows, disappearing into the night before Buck could even make it to the bottom of the steps.
• • •
MARIE WASTED NO time putting distance between herself and the house. Knowing where all the obstacles and pitfalls were, she had little trouble making her way in the dark, but she was completely unaware of the humanoid figure slithering from beneath the horse trailer on the far side of the yard, drawing a knife and moving out after her.
The American-born Al Qaeda shadowed her through the dark, his footfalls every bit as muffled by the rain as hers, dogging her far out into the night and almost losing her as she broke left to the east, but catching up to her as she arrived at the barbed wire fence marking the southern property limit.
Marie was in the process of climbing over when someone grabbed the hood of her jacket and pulled her violently off the fence. She landed hard on her back, knocking enough wind from her lungs to stifle a scream. The dark figure began kicking her in the ribs, forcing her to roll onto her belly. Then he pounced on her back, straddling her and sinking his fingers deep into her now soaking hair, yanking her head back to expose her throat. She felt the cold steel of the blade press into the jugular.
The angry Muslim had spent the entire night freezing in the mud beneath the trailer, but now his miseries were about to be rewarded. He hissed into her ear, “I’m going to cut your fucking head off, and show it to your husband!”
“No, wait!” she gasped, her arms pinioned at her sides by his legs.
He redoubled his grip on her hair, jerking her head back as far as it would come and crying out in triumph, “Allahu Akbar!”
Marie screamed, and one hundred pounds of snarling, soaking-wet canis lupus familiaris slammed into the Muslim from behind, knocking him forward over her head onto his hands and knees. Oso Cazador sank his teeth into the back of the man’s neck, snarling wildly as he jerked the man about like a rag doll.
The interloper flailed helplessly beneath the dog, unable to roll onto his back or to shake off the animal. He made a desperate attempt to flip himself over but felt a sharp pinch between his C4 and C5 vertebra, and his body suddenly stopped responding to his commands.
Oso was an experienced killer, having killed many varmints—and even a coyote—in just this same manner, and he knew what it meant when a prey’s body went limp. He released his grip on the man’s neck and sat back on his haunches, wagging his tail and looking at Marie for approval. When she didn’t immediately sit up, he went to her, licking her face and beginning to whine.
Exhausted by the adrenaline dump, Marie lay with her face in the mud, almost too weak to move. “Good boy,” she mumbled, forcing herself to reach out and stroke the dog. “Good boy, Cazador.”
The dog went back to licking her face, and the warmness of his tongue ignited within her an internal heat source that spread a faint glow of warmth through her body. After a few moments, she found the strength to sit up against the fence post, pulling the hood up over her head to keep the rain from running down her back. She made a halfhearted attempt to stand and was jarred by a stabbing pain in her left side. The pain was not unfamiliar to her; she had broken ribs twice before: once by falling from a horse and once by getting kicked by one.
“It’s gonna be a long walk,” she said to the dog.
The man lying facedown in the mud began to moan, and she pulled the .45 from the holster beneath her jacket, crawling over onto his back and pressing the muzzled to his side.
“How many are you?” she demanded.
“I can’t move,” he whimpered. “I need a medic.”
“You need a helluva lot more than that,” she said, resting with her face against his back. He was much warmer than the ground, and she thought it odd that she could be comforted by the heat of a man who had almost murdered her. “How many are you?”
“Twenty. I need a hospital . . . please.”
“You need a coroner.” She canted the muzzle slightly downward toward the earth and squeezed the trigger. The pistol report was muffled by his body, and she felt him recoil against the jolt of the Federal hollow point ripping through his internal organs. He died almost instantly from the hydrostatic shock. She felt the air rush out of him and rolled off, sitting up against the stringers of barbed wire and reaching out to her dog.
“Come here, boy,” she said. “Help Mama get to her feet.”
56
MONTANA
Akram radioed to Abad that they were going up the hill to make sure that Shannon was dead and to shoot anyone coming out of the house. He and Duke climbed down from the loft at the back of the stable and made their way up the hill.
No one had heard Marie’s scream over the driving rain.
After the climb, they came to stand over the more or less headless corpse of Glen Ferguson, still zipped up in the ECW sleeping bag with his arms sticking out through the improvised holes.
Duke kicked the Mauser downhill and raised the infrared binocular up onto his head, shining a Tactical Touch flashlight onto the bloody mess at their feet with a derisive chuckle. “Nice of him to provide his own body bag like that. Whattaya say there, Akram? Think he’s dead?”
Akram couldn’t help smiling. Now, no matter what happened to him, the fiend murderer Gil Shannon was dead, destined to fuel the fires of Jahannam for all eternity. “I think he’s burning in hell.”
“Good. Now let’s get the fuck outta this rain and head back to the hotel to square up.”
“How do I know you won’t kill me the moment I transfer the rest of your money?”
“Because I ain’t no fourteen-carat son of a bitch like
you—that’s how.”
“Forgive my bluntness, Duke, but you are a traitor to your own people.”
“That’s between them and me. I put in nineteen goddamn years of loyal service, and they kicked me to the curb. Now what’s it gonna be, tough guy: do or die?”
Akram felt something hot and wet spatter his face, followed by the distant echo of a rifle shot.
Duke dropped his flashlight, and the strap of the TAC-50 slipped from his shoulder. He put a hand to his stomach, where his fingers found a gaping exit wound the size of a baseball. “Fuck,” he muttered, and dropped dead to the ground.
Akram dove between the rocks as another round ricocheted off a boulder. He grabbed the strap of the TAC-50 and pulled it to him while radioing Abad that Shannon was firing from inside the house.
Automatic weapons fire broke out down below, and Akram pulled the infrared binocular from Duke’s head, snatching the dog tags from what was left of the body, before scrambling back down the trail on the eastern side of the slope. He radioed for the men to cease fire, and ten minutes later linked back up with them in the stable, where they all stood around in a heated frenzy.
“Where’s Duke?” Abad asked.
“Shannon shot him,” Akram said, throwing the dog tags at him. “He tricked us!”
Abad shined a red penlight on one of the tags, reading Glen’s name and seeing the “USMC.” The idea of killing Marines was distasteful to him, and he was ready to be done with the entire mess. “Uday is missing.”
“What do you mean he’s missing?”
“Just what I said. He’s missing. He was under the horse trailer covering the front of the house. Now he’s not there, and we can’t find him. I told you we needed more radios.”
“Have you tried his phone?” Akram asked testily.
“There’s no damn signal out here.”
Akram combed his fingers through his wet hair. “So what are you saying? That someone came out of the house and dragged him inside?”
Abad may have been a devout Muslim, but he’d been raised in America, and the American in him didn’t have the patience for Akram’s condescending Arabian bullshit. “I’m saying he’s missing! Open your ears!”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“I’m talking to you,” Abad said, stepping forward. “And I’m telling you one of our men is missing. We need to end this, Akram, and we need to end it soon.”
• • •
WHEN THE FIRING had died off, Buck crawled down the hall with the Winchester into the bathroom, checking on Janet, who was curled up beneath a blanket in the cast-iron bathtub. “You okay in here, Jan?” Lighting flashed, and he saw a big chip in the porcelain where a bullet fragment had struck the side of the tub.
“Fit as a fiddle,” she answered. “How are you men doing?”
“We’re okay,” he said, pulling himself up against the tub. “I got one of ’em up there on the ridge.”
“Good for you!”
“Jan, I think Glen and Roger might be dead.”
She peaked over the edge of the tub. “You can’t know that.”
“Two of them godless sons a bitches were just standin’ up there with a flashlight, like they didn’t have a care in the world. They were lookin’ down at somethin’. I think it was one of my boys.”
She reached out, touching his face in the darkness. “If it was, Buck, he’s in a better place now. But don’t give up hope.”
57
LANGLEY
When Pope at last broke through the firewall on Kashkin’s hard drive, gaining full access to the encrypted data, it wasn’t necessary for him to translate the Chechen text in order to know which city had been targeted. The myriad photographs of Washington, DC, were obvious in any language.
He grabbed for the phone. His call to Edwards was answered on the first ring. “White House Chief of Staff Tim Hagen speaking.”
“This is Pope. Get the president.”
The president of the United States came on the line. “What do you have, Robert?”
“Mr. President, you need to order an immediate evacuation of Washington, DC. I still have to translate the Chechen text to English”—he was rapidly paging through a series of JPEG files—“but I’m looking at dozens of photos taken in and around the capital. All of our most important buildings have been photographed in detail; multiple telescopic photos of security points around the White House and the Capitol building.”
“How fast can you remit those files for evaluation at our end?”
“I’ll translate them immediately and send them within the half hour, Mr. President, but in the meantime, sir, I strongly recommend you order the evacuation.”
“I’ll do it immediately. Now, forward those files as soon as you can.”
“Yes, sir. There’s something else, Mr. President.”
“What is it?”
“Our interrogation of Haroun al-Rashid revealed nothing,” Pope said, “but his sister-in-law told us that her husband, Akram al-Rashid, is on his way to Gil Shannon’s place in Montana to assassinate him.”
“Okay,” the president said. “Then it’s lucky that Shannon is with you. I assume his wife is moving to a safe location?”
“Not exactly, sir. She’s still on the ranch, and she’s not answering the phone. I’ve cleared Shannon to fly to Montana in the Gulfstream V.”
There was another typically long pause at the president’s end before he made his reply. “To be frank with you, Robert, I’m getting tired of losing my temper—especially with you. So let me make something perfectly clear without shouting . . . Shannon and his team are not your personal army. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Are they in the air now?”
“They are, sir. I’ve already alerted the Montana Highway Patrol and the local FBI office in Helena.”
“Excellent,” the president said. “In that case, we’re going to allow the local authorities to do their jobs. You do realize that Shannon’s team gunned down six off-duty police officers and a young woman during the Vegas operation.”
“Mr. President, the young woman was shot by one of Faisal’s men, and there was no way we could have anticipated out-of-town law enforcement getting involved. It’s the fog of war, sir.”
The president grunted. “Well, fog or no fog, Shannon and his team have served their purpose. I’m going to order them back on the ground and fully debriefed.”
58
MONTANA
Marie and Oso arrived at the Chatham ranch looking like a couple of drowned rats. A bed-headed Dusty Chatham answered the door in his bare feet, naked to the waist in a pair of blue jeans. He was forty-five with a black beard trimmed close to his face. The Chathams and the McGuthrys had a long history of bad blood dating back to the late forties, all of it over land disputes. There had never been any rancor between Marie and Dusty, however, the trouble having always been between their fathers and grandfathers.
“Marie?” Dusty’s face was a mask of disbelief.
“Dusty, I’m really sorry to bother you so late, but I’ve got big trouble. Can I use your phone?”
“Yeah,” he said, stepping back to let them inside. “Hey, that’s a big dog.”
“He just saved my life.”
He shut the door. “How’d he do that? What’s going on?”
“You won’t believe it, but Al Qaeda just tried to blow up my house.” Her cracked rib was making it painful to breathe, and she was using both hands to apply pressure to it. “They came for Gil, but he’s not there, and we think they’ve already killed Glen and Roger Ferguson.”
He gaped at her. “What? Marie, slow down and tell me what’s really going on.”
“I swear it’s the truth.”
“Al Qaeda? Here? How many?”
“About twenty, I
think. I snuck off to find a phone, and Buck stayed behind with Hal to protect my mother. She’s hurt. I gotta call Gil so he can get us some help out there before it’s too late.”
“Sure, there’s the phone over there on the wall, but how do you know it’s Al Qaeda?”
“I don’t have time to explain, but I swear to God it’s the truth. They put a price on Gil’s head right after he won the Medal of Honor.”
There was almost no one in the state of Montana who didn’t know about Gil being a war hero. “Make your call. I’m gonna get dressed and grab my rifle.”
She moved toward the phone. “Dusty, I can’t ask you to get involved in this.”
“Don’t be silly, Marie. I never had nothin’ against you. It was our dads who didn’t wanna get along.”
She took the receiver from the hook on the old push-button phone. “Gettin’ along is one thing, Dusty, but gettin’ shot at is another.”
“Just call your old man,” he said, trotting upstairs. “I’ll be right down.”
Gil answered a minute later. “Hello?”
“Gil, it’s me!”
“Thank God!” he said. “I’ve been calling the house, but no one answers. Are you guys all right?”
“No. Al Qaeda’s back, and there’s about twenty of ’em. I think they’ve already killed Glen and Roger. I’m at Chatham’s place now with Oso. Buck and Hal are still back at the ranch lookin’ after Mama. She got hurt when they tried to blow up the house, Gil.”
“How bad are you hurt?” Gil’s tone was hard and deep, very soldierly. “And don’t tell me you’re fine. I can hear it in your voice.”
“I got a cracked rib, but I’m okay. One of them caught me trying to escape in the storm, but Oso saved me.”
Gil dominated his terror. “Are you safe now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’m already in the air with my team and headed that way. You stay put.”
“Dusty’s getting his rifle. I think he means to go help Buck.”
“You’re kidding! He hates Buck.” Dusty and Buck had gotten into huge festering arguments at nearly every cattle auction for the last ten years, each regularly accusing the other of intentionally driving up the bid just to piss off the other. “Talk ’im out of it if you can. He’ll only get himself killed. Either way, you stay put. Hear me?”