Jack Be Nimble: A Lion About to Roar Book 4

by Ben English

  “Go,” said Ian.

  “Watch for her at the cave mouth. If we’re not out in twenty minutes, we’re not coming out.”

  Mercedes didn’t understand this last bit.

  “Sending you a schematic of the rest of the compound now,” said Steve. “You can unplug Raines’ computer, I’ve got as much of a disk image as I can.”

  Jack checked his phone. He was already disengaging cables. “Twenty minutes,” he repeated, and disconnected the call.

  “You keep everybody in groups of two?” she asked. The table needed clearing.

  “Tactically, two people are as effective as a team of four. Alonzo’s idea. He teaches a graduate course in this stuff.” Jack saw her starting to collect plates, and added, “Don’t worry about doing the dishes. Pretty sure Raines pays somebody to take care of that. You ready? We’re going to make a run for the well.”

  She noticed he’d transferred ammunition clips and other small items to his pockets. The small pack only held Raines’ computer. “I thought we were headed for the transmitter on the mountain.”

  He shook his head. “I’m taking you to the well. Ian’s going to meet us in the tunnel and make sure you and the computer get to Steve.

  “Funny story about the well,” he began. He was trying to distract her, and his tone held a significance she couldn’t identify. Jack fussed with the latch on the pack.

  “But Steve said himself, he doesn’t need Alex’s computer.”

  He changed his mind about closing the pack, decided to add the cables. Stuffed them in with just a shade too much force. She noticed he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You’re not coming with me,” he said. “You’re getting out of here and—”

  Mercedes set her jaw. “I’m coming with you.”

  His eyes twinkled, but held a sliver of anguish. “Suppose I could knock you over the head and lock you in with the pig-face bacon.”

  Ah, the old male trick, distract and conquer. She didn’t take the bait. “That’s harder to do than you’d imagine. Try your Vulcan nerve pinch all you want, you’re not going alone.”

  “We have a very narrow window here. The storm knocked everything out for awhile, but when Raines finishes rewriting the code, he’ll pull the trigger. We’ve got to hit him now, hard, and that takes training you don’t have.”

  She screwed up her face. “Okay, you go ahead. I’ll run to the well and make it out myself. I won’t follow you.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  Jack flared. “Damn it, Victoria, we don’t have time for this. The transmitter is going to go down, and you can’t be anywhere near it.”

  Victoria?

  “Why not? Teams of two, Jack. Tactically as effective as four.”

  He grew pale underneath his tan. Before he could speak, she touched his face. “At the airport, I saw you dive in front of a train,” she said. “I watched when they fired mortars at you; everybody thought it was really you. But the thing is, when they told me you were alive, it felt—it felt like I was having a heart attack. Like somebody picked up the world, shined it up all bright and pretty, and set it down again before anyone could notice but me.”

  “No.” He stepped back, just outside her reach. “You don’t owe me anything. It’s the other way around.” He closed his eyes in a long blink. “Okay, here’s how this is going to play.”

  As he spoke he disassembled, checked, and rebuilt his gun. “You don’t run ahead of me. Never leave my side. Stay close, but not so close that I can’t move fast. Are you one of those people who are offended that guns exist?”

  “Actually I was wondering when you’ll hand one over.”

  He passed her the clip and the sidearm, separately. The gun itself didn’t look that different from the one she kept at home. She checked the number of rounds in the magazine, closed the slide, and slapped the mag hard into the magwell. Feeling a bit self-conscious, she pulled back the slide, chambered a round, and thumbed the slide release so it snapped shut. She couldn’t find a safety on the gun—must be an internal feature—so she settled for handing it back, loaded. “I recommend you keep it hot,” she said. “Without a bullet in the pipe, it’s a five hundred dollar brick.” She met his gaze without blinking. “I keep a Beretta 9 millimeter in my house.”

  (In a locked box at the bottom of my swimsuit drawer, she didn’t add)

  He took the gun. She wasn’t sure if she’d passed. “Fine, you’ve got the methods, the skill. You know some of the details. Where is your head at?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your inhibitions can kill you, Mercedes. Strike first, hit with everything you have. Don’t hold anything back in a fight. Cheat. We’re going to destroy that transmitter. Whatever and whoever is between us and the target is just an obstacle to be overcome.

  “So you can load a gun. If you can do that, you know the damage these things can do.” He returned to packing. “See if there’s a first aid kit around here.”

  Contingency

  Raining in London. Complete waste of a starched uniform. Rear Admiral Davidson Farragut Bonneville had led men across beaches under fire for the better part of three decades, and something as prosaic as London mist would not keep his wife from the theater.

  Ibsen’s The Master Builder was her favorite play. Her surprise at the invitation to accompany him to the NATO conference was genuine and warm, but unmatched by her stunned reaction when he presented her with tickets to the Almeida theatre, in Islington.

  It was time for this sort of thing. Farragut had outlived more than his share of wars. Spent a lifetime taking and giving careful orders. Though his wife claimed he’d been an adult since birth, Farragut had recently discovered a healthy measure of spontaneity.

  The universe cooperated. The Almeida was the first city theater to re-open since the incident at the Illuminatus Tower. His carefully-crafted plans for a spontaneous outing with his wife were playing out with martial precision.

  His phone rang as they stepped into the whitewashed lobby. Damn thing. Even with two personal secretaries, calls still found a way through. He recognized the picture associated with the caller ID, and left his wife to fend for herself. Had plenty of practice ignoring her disappointed expression.

  Farragut found a quiet alcove and stood with his shoulders to the brick wall. Too easy to be approached covertly while one’s attention was occupied. Cell phones made idiots of people, most of whom were defenseless imbeciles already, without assistance.

  “Speak,” he said, and listened.

  “No,” he said, “Quicker. Just the details.” He felt his face grow hard. At length, he interrupted the speaker. “Send me the information; I’ll pass it up the chain of command.” A fresh torrent of words began, but Farragut cut them off sharply. “And I’ll speak to the Chief of Naval Operations. There is a ship already in port, near Havana—what do you mean, you can see it? You’re not there personally, are you?”

  He massaged the bridge of his nose with the back of a knuckle. “I thought you kept yourself at a distance from these shenanigans. If your mother knew what you were up to, she’d—she’s here with me, now. Brought her to London with me. We’re just about to watch that Ibsen play she enjoys.”

  Farragut’s mind leaped ahead to the conversation he was about to have with the CNO. Half of what Nicole told him was fantastical, borderline nonsense, but he knew better. She was her father’s daughter, and brooked no foolishness. He’d made certain of that.

  “You’ll stay out of the line of fire, hear?” He held the phone so that he could see the image on the caller ID. Her voice sounded even more distant from the earpiece.

  “I will. Okay.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “I love you, Daddy.”

  Farragut looked at the tiny onscreen image a moment more, and ended the call. The picture persisted a few seconds before the screen went dark. He’d added the caller ID image himself. It was of a younger officer, in dress whites, holding the hand of a small girl in a bright yellow rainco
at. She was caught in mid-twirl, her father watching.

  He still watched her. “I love you, too,” he whispered.

  The Story About the Well

  She found a box of children’s Band-Aids under the kitchen counter, bright pink and decorated with Sanrio characters.

  “Perfect,” said Jack when he saw the box. “Hello Kitty to the rescue.” He said it with a smile on his face, hoping to ease her mind.

  Mercedes had flushed during their argument, and Jack was privately pleased at her anger. If he read her right, a measure of strong emotion would blunt the edge of the panic which threatened them both. The next step was to go on the move, get focused on the mission at hand. As long as they stayed on the offensive, fear was a secondary consideration. Fear would steal their energy, cause them to hesitate. They’d be pulled toward whatever they focused on, so the only real option was to focus on inevitable success.

  “Jack, about that. Rescue. Is anybody looking for us?”

  So that’s what she was thinking. Jack answered immediately. “Nicole is still in Havana. We have a plan in place; if we don’t check in at certain times, she alerts certain people. The FBI and the US Navy already have copies of our files on Raines, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that Navy ship in the Havana harbor was closing in on the island right now.”

  He could tell she needed to hear more. Jack knew he needed to sound invincible, to project total confidence. She was going to have to deal with the memory of the island for a long time, and she needed to believe that no other possibility existed besides the inevitability of their coming through all this mess alive.

  Jack blinked and smiled, startled by his own train of thought. By considering the island in terms of a future memory, he himself actually believed they were going to make it through. It was easy to speak with conviction.

  “Nicole is the key. Her father is a high mucky-muck in the US Navy. She’ll use him to send a message to the head of the U.S. Naval Forces’ Southern Command, and the evidence we’ve gathered since coming to the island is enough to get him to send in the cavalry—in this case, the Fourth Fleet. She’ll go all the way to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Weller, if she has to.”

  “Something tells me you’ve done this before.” Her color was returning to normal.

  They stood a long time at the set of double doors, listening for any sound in the dining area beyond.

  “We follow Steve’s map to the elevators, deeper into the mountain. There’s supposed to be a service area that opens out onto the mountainside. From there it’s a short hike up to the transmitter.”

  No one waited in the dining hall. The storm had indeed lessened; without the wind to drive it, the rain barely fell against the yards of glass between them and the garden. Greenery lay scattered without order or pattern. They could see the well.

  She must have been reading his mind. “You mentioned a story about that well,” she said. Whispering seemed appropriate.

  “An old smuggler’s tunnel, according to a US army historian who loves this place. We have remote access to the Library of Congress, and found out a lot of information in the short time we had to plan the mission. The volcano last erupted in the late 1600’s, when the Dutch were the real power around here. Kroon the Black built the first fort, and other pirates used it too, mostly Dutch and English raiders fighting Catholic Spain. Eventually someone turned it into an estate, then a casino between the world wars. In the ‘30’s, one of the guests noticed that the well water tasted salty after a storm. They found all kinds of tunnels under the island after that.” He felt like he was skipping the best parts of the story. “The Army Corps of Engineers expanded on everything, and mapped everything out during the war. The Marines used the island to practice landing techniques that they later perfected at places with names you’d recognize.”

  “Pelelieu, Iwo Jima, Leyte, Corregidor.”

  “Right. Places with beaches and tunnels that needed infiltrating.”

  There was a display of old tableware in a tiny alcove near the doors leading back to the stairwell. Old Dutch crockery, a pitcher and a few other random bits, arranged like a tiny museum. He paused before it and took something.

  Mercedes noticed. “A spoon?”

  “Got a friend who collects spoons,” he said. “If we get out of here alive, I’ll send Raines a check.”

  They retraced their steps to the stairwell. Jack led with the gun. With every step he felt more and more awake. His senses opened up. Layers of details multiplied around him without repetition.

  Jack paused before the first step down.

  “If anything goes wrong,” he said, “anything at all, meet me at the well.”

  Share of Patience

  “Did he say when they’d be in the tunnel?”

  The sun was out, bright as anything. Soon the morning air would evolve into a heavy, humid soup.

  At the cliffside, Ian blinked against the brightness, aware he didn’t need any additional illumination to see that Mother Nature had well and truly screwed them over. The storm’s general effects stripped most of the leaves, vines, and bark from the trees (this eliminated their air cover), and wedged all kinds of debris solidly into every nook and cranny of the lighthouse ruin. The combined result made for all kinds of opportunities to trip, and stumbling around the hill became an exercise in slapstick. He’d already fallen twice.

  The specific effects of the storm were much worse. Too much of the hillside was going the way of the lighthouse. Armfuls of stone and earth were still breaking off and falling into the surf below. A network of cracks reached deeply inward from the edge of the cliff inland; one crevice was wide enough to accommodate his hand. Ian knelt and reached in as far as his armpit without finding evidence that the rock clove together again. Worse, the stones and earth were soaked. Gravity would pull more of the cliff down by the end of the day, and God help them if it rained again.

  Would be nice to think that someone was watching out for them. The makeshift elevator had taken a real beating during the storm. Miracle it hadn’t just blown away. Two of the tripod legs stood free of the ground, and nearly all the anchor chains were loose. During the hurricane’s worst, when they were sheltering in the cave below, Ian had pulled the metal platform inside with them. So he’d started out the day by making an arguably intelligent decision.

  But the day was still young.

  Steve was occupied with the computers, so Ian worked by himself, shoring up the ground at the base of the tripod. The anchor chains were another matter. Some of the trees Jack had used were simply gone, and without the chains pulling in separate directions, the tripod was completely unstable. Luck more than anything else kept it from collapsing under the weight of the platform, let alone a human.

  Fearing exactly this, they’d come up from the cave one at a time—even so, Ian didn’t see how the contraption managed to hold either of them.

  Finding a secure anchor point for each of the chains was impossible, so he settled for combining two of the lengths of chain—clipping the end of one into the strongest-looking link of another—and looping the farthest part around a piece of exposed foundation stone.

  Ian was glad for the work. He possessed a normal man’s share of patience, but since arriving on the island he’d chafed at the mounting delays. Part of that was a slow-burn anger at what Raines was attempting, but honestly, he didn’t like being left behind as part of the geek squad while everyone else was in the field, outnumbered.

  But they depended on him for a secure fallback position. Securing the area was a relatively quick task that should have been finished five minutes after they set up the crow’s nest on Lighthouse Hill, but, well, the storm.

  Because he’d been preoccupied earlier that morning trying to locate a shipment of pig face bacon, he’d only been able to pack five claymore mines. He unwrapped them now, checking each before setting them down.

  A claymore mine was a tightly-packaged parcel from Hell, a fiberglass shell filled with plastic explosive
mixed with seven hundred steel ball bearings. Each was rectangular, about a hand span high and twice that much across and almost two inches thick, colored a dull silver and slightly curved from side to side. Its advantage lay in that it fired in an easily-discernable direction, rather than just exploding like a grenade (Ian thought he detected a ring of military humor in the warning phrases printed on one side, “Front Toward Enemy”, and “Explosive is poisonous if eaten. Produces toxic gases”). Pointed metal legs folded down from underneath so it could be jabbed into the ground like a tiny drive-in movie screen. When fired, the load of ball bearings sprayed out, molten, faster than the speed of sound. Afterward, anything within a fifty-yard arc was generally unrecognizable. Most organic objects within a hundred-yard arc of the front of the device could then be safely classified as formerly-living things.

  You wouldn’t think such a sledgehammer needed precision, but there was an art to placing a claymore. Lighthouse Hill was generally defensible; broad patches of tall grass around its base denied cover to attackers, except for a heavily wooded section that sat next to a natural fold in the earth. Alonzo and Allison went this way, following a trail which kept them out of any direct line of fire from the top of the hill. Ian knew this because he’d been watching when they left, thinking about how he’d defend the area when they returned with all of Raines’ private army on their asses.

  Imagining that private army and the manner in which they’d likely approach the hill, Ian hiked up and down the little ravine, readjusting the claymores until their fields of fire overlapped just enough. He still had one mine left, and was trying to decide where to put it when his eye fell on the transmitting tower atop the mountain.

  Now that would make for a decent hike. There was probably an access road to the site, unless they’d dropped all the construction material in by helicopter. Ian looked through his rifle scope on maximum magnification, and followed each series of ridges downslope. He bet he could make it in less than half an hour, if he travelled light. On his second examination of the mountainside, he spotted a building nearly a quarter of a mile below the transmitter. Looked like a house, set right in the side of the mountain. He’d never have noticed it if the light hadn’t angled just so off the windows.