I chose the path of least resistance, wading through the prairie flowers. When I reached the end of the span, the grade of the surrounding area rose, and I could see that the structure wasn’t a wall at all, but the side of a reservoir.
The walls formed two squares, their inside surfaces sharply sloped into vats of water one hundred feet square. Algae floated in globs on the water’s surface, and a green, rotting smell hung in the air. A walkway with a yellow pipe railing flanked one side, three ancient orange ring buoys piled at the edge.
To my right, a circular driveway looped out of the trees, and parked close to the reservoir’s walkway were two four-wheeled ATVs. Pulling out my Beretta, I inched forward.
I smelled the wisp of cigarette smoke before I spotted the sentry.
He stood on a lookout platform near the entrance to the walkway. Glowing cancer stick in his mouth, he clutched a set of binoculars in his right hand and was peering at the vista below.
Two ATVs meant two guards. I scanned the area for his buddy, but came up empty. He had to be fairly close, otherwise he wouldn’t have left his ride, but there was no sign of him anywhere.
My back flattened against the cold concrete, I eyed the four-wheelers. With one of those, not only could I reach Tequila before he missed me, but also we would have a way to get Fleming out in a hurry.
I was betting Mr. Smokebreak had the keys.
All I had to do was take them.
Giving the area another once-over for the second man, I shoved my weapon back in its holster and approached the sentry from behind, choosing to attempt the quiet kill so I wouldn’t alert his buddy. Walking on the balls of my feet, I moved silently as a cat, knees soft but ready to spring. I raised my arms, extended the fingers and thumb of my left hand, and made a fist with my right. About three feet away, I jumped.
I struck him across the throat with the inner edge of my left forearm, at the same moment punching hard into the small of his back. He staggered and gasped in a breath, pulling in smoke. Sputtering and coughing, he let the cigarette drop to the platform.
Not skipping a beat, I clamped his throat tight in the vee of my elbow and grasped my left biceps, then pushed his head downward with my right hand, cutting off his carotid artery.
Without blood flow to his brain, he passed out in a few seconds. But passed out wasn’t good enough.
For a second, I hesitated, even though I knew what had to be done. Despite the fact that I’d killed plenty of men before, and this guy was a guard at a black site and no innocent, I couldn’t help but see Jack’s wide eyes and hear her whisper in the back of my mind when I’d asked her if she could slit a man’s throat or cut off digits to get information.
You do those things?
The guard tensed, starting to come to. I increased pressure, depriving his brain once again. Once he lost consciousness, I changed my grip and gave his head a wrench until the neck snapped, then I lowered him to the platform.
Yes, Jack. I guess I do.
But that didn’t mean I felt good about it. Hands vibrating from the adrenaline dump that usually accompanied taking a life, I went through his pockets and recovered a cell phone, a pack of cigarettes, and the ATV keys. I headed to the circle drive to claim my reward.
Then I caught peripheral movement at the tree line.
I jerked sideways, diving for the ground just as two bullets punched into my back.
Fleming
“The only thing to fear more than your enemy,” the Instructor said, “is your enemy when he’s pissed off.”
The screaming in the adjacent cell stopped.
Fleming was already cold, shivering, and naked on the concrete floor, but she knew what turning off the recording meant.
Sure enough, her cell door opened a moment later.
A guard came in first, older than the previous one, a long stick in his hand. Fleming recognized it as a cattle prod by the electrodes on the end.
She tried to drag herself backward, but the prod touched her chest with a sharp crack! Though she’d never been stabbed with a hot poker, Fleming could guess it felt just as terrible. She cried out, shrinking away from the pain, the stench of ozone and burned skin clogging her nostrils.
Malcolm stepped into the room next, his hand swaddled in white bandages. The look in his eyes was somewhere between doped-up and furious. He hadn’t bothered to reapply his concealer makeup, and his port-wine stain was as dark as a raspberry.
“Three fingers,” he said, his voice slurring from pain, painkillers, or both. “That’s how much your little stunt cost me.”
He nodded at the guard, who juiced her again.
Fleming was able to knock the prod away, but she felt the urge to scream and keep screaming. Instead she ground her teeth together and met Malcolm’s eyes. “It’ll be OK. You only need two fingers to jerk that tiny thing between your legs.”
Malcolm’s eyes practically popped out of his head. He shoved the guard with his good hand, and Fleming was zapped two more times.
“You disfigured me, you crippled little bitch.”
Fleming found her voice. “Haven’t you checked a mirror lately? God beat me to it.”
She tried to brace herself, knowing it was impossible, but the attack didn’t come. Instead, Malcolm squatted down on his haunches, looking so angry his face twitched.
“Here’s what’s going to happen to you. I’m going to hurt you until you tell me everything I want to know. And then”—he smiled—“I’m going to keep hurting you anyway.”
Fleming tried desperately to come up with some comeback, some retort, but fear closed up her throat.
“Get the cart,” he ordered the guard. “We’re going to strap her down and have ourselves a grand old time.”
The White House
It had taken a lot of digging, threats, and bribes, before the president was properly debriefed on Project Hydra.
His findings were illuminating. In some instances, Hydra had altered the course of history. It had averted wars, taken out key enemies, and helped the United States remain the world’s biggest power. A rogue Hydra agent was responsible for the missile launch on the UK, but two other agents had thwarted the attempt. One of them was the woman in custody.
The president called his contact. “Where is Fleming?” he demanded, using her codename, the only name he knew.
“She’s being interrogated.” His contact’s voice was flat, impossible to read, as always.
“Interrogated? She’s a goddamn hero. This country, and the world, owes her a huge debt.”
“May I ask where you’ve gotten your information, Mr. President?”
“Where are we keeping her?”
“She’s…at a black site.”
The president closed his eyes. He knew what went on at black sites. “Jesus. Which one? Egypt? South Korea?”
“Baraboo.”
“Where is that? Poland?”
“Wisconsin.”
“We’ve got a secret prison on US soil?” He didn’t normally have heart palpitations, but he was having them now. “Do you have any idea of the PR nightmare I’m living right now because of the London incident?”
“Very few people know about the Baraboo site.”
“And apparently I wasn’t among them. Who set this up?”
“I did. And we’ll keep it quiet.”
“I want her flown to me immediately.”
“That might be…tricky.”
“I don’t care how goddamn tricky it is—make it happen, or Baraboo’s next prisoner will be you.”
Tequila
Tequila whistled twice, long and short, then went behind the cannon house and detonated the charge on the kennel, blowing off the door.
They came three minutes and eight seconds later. Four men, armed with handguns, coming through the hatch and spreading out, their long shadows trailing behind them.
Tequila didn’t want to waste ammo, so he’d appropriated one of the dead guard’s guns, a 9mm Sig, and fired four times i
nto one of the blast walls. Then he squatted with his back against the building and watched.
The men converged on the gunshots.
Tequila raised the dog whistle to his lips once more, and blew three times in quick succession.
He didn’t hear anything.
Neither did the men.
But the dogs did.
Every since his bad experience with dogs trained to kill, Tequila had studied up on commands. Most attack dogs were trained with a dog whistle, the advantage being that it was so high frequency that the enemy didn’t know an order had been given. When Tequila discovered the kennel, he’d worked for fifteen minutes with the dogs, learning their commands with the whistle he always carried in his holster.
Three rapid blows meant “Attack.”
The four dogs each targeted a guard, bolting silently from the open kennel.
Shots were fired.
No dogs were hurt.
But the guards were.
When the last one had had his throat torn out, Tequila blew the Stay command.
Then he waited for more guards to come.
Hammett
“War is hell,” the Instructor said. “If you want to win, be worse than hell.”
Hammett had to assume that guards patrolling with long arms would attract unwanted attention, especially so close to a small community like Baraboo. Which is why they stuck with handguns.
Big mistake.
When they got within striking distance of Badger Ammo’s entrance, she motioned to Isaiah, who carried a 30-06 Winchester 70 bolt-action rifle with a Redfield scope, which she’d purchased at a department store in the Dells using her fake ID.
He didn’t say a word, just waited for her to tell him what she wanted.
Hammett liked that in a man. “See the sentry at the gate?”
He nodded.
“How about the guard at the entrance booth?” The man had emerged from the little hut and was now pacing in casual little circles, taking a smoke break.
Another nod from Isaiah.
“Show me what you can do.”
Isaiah blew the forehead off the sentry at the gate, the single crack echoing back from the Baraboo bluffs to the north. Two seconds later he fired again, and the entrance booth guard gave a twitch and fell to the gravel.
Served the moron right. Every pack of cigarettes had a warning on it stating that smoking was hazardous to your health.
Isaiah glanced at Hammett over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow as if silently asking, Impressed? Hammett shrugged. They were head shots from forty meters away, but she could have done that with a handgun after half a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. “How about the cameras?”
Isaiah took aim at the nearest, mounted on a post. He fired. The camera stayed where it was.
“You missed,” Javier said.
“Did I?”
Hammett checked with the binocs, and saw Isaiah had severed the power line to the camera. Now that was a tough shot, even for her.
“Get the other two and meet us at the garage.”
They each drew a sidearm and jogged up to the gate, out of Isaiah’s line of fire as he made easy work of the other two cameras. No doubt the guards had already been alerted to their presence, but Hammett preferred to keep her face from being recorded. Jersey led the way, Javier covering the left, Hammett right, Santiago bringing up the rear.
When they reached the steel garage door, Hammett chanced a look and noted a heavy-duty disc padlock on a serious-looking hasp.
“No problem,” Jersey said. “I’ve got a universal key.”
Hammett shot him a look. “So you said.”
He removed his rucksack and knelt down as he went through it, coming out with a Serbu Super Shorty shotgun, an adorable twelve-gauge no more than seventeen inches long. He unfolded the foregrip on the pump, took aim, and fired. The slug instantly devoured the top half of the lock. The rest clinked to the asphalt.
Not bad.
Javier lifted the door to interior darkness, and Hammett flipped on the 190-lumen flashlight mounted to the trigger guard of her Supergrade. The garage smelled like gas and exhaust fumes and an underlying bouquet of dirt. She swept the interior and immediately noticed three ATVs parked along the west wall. Hammett approached one.
No keys.
She pressed the talk button on her radio.
“Speed, can you hotwire an ATV?”
“Lady, I could hotwire a racehorse.”
“Bring the truck in, park behind the garage, and get in here.” Hammett nodded at Javier, who went off to greet him.
Gunshots punctuated the air, not from her team but from somewhere within the plant. Hammett dug out her tablet and checked the GPS tracker. One blip for her, one for Fleming, but Chandler seemed to be in Baraboo, a few miles away.
So who was shooting?
“Check that out,” she ordered Isaiah.
He nodded and jogged off.
“You seem concerned,” Santiago said, standing uncomfortably close to her.
“Watch the door.”
He did as she said, but the creepy psychopathic sadist was right. She was concerned.
Hammett didn’t like it when guests showed up uninvited. If it wasn’t Chandler, there was someone else it could be. Someone who knew she was here.
Her boss.
The only person in the world Hammett really feared.
Chandler
“The only safe place in a gunfight,” the Instructor said, “is somewhere else.”
I rolled with the bullets’ impact, somersaulting and coming up on my feet, first in a stagger, then in a sprint, heading away from the shooter, surprised I wasn’t dead. It felt like I’d been walloped with a baseball bat in the upper back, but there was none of the searing pain that always accompanied being shot. Instead I felt a dull throb, as though I’d been wearing Kevlar.
My gym bag was crammed with supplies. It had stopped the slugs and saved my life.
I hoped that didn’t mean I had to sleep with Harry McGlade.
I pushed away the revulsion and focused my attention on the here and now. I had more pressing matters on my mind than unpleasant sex, like avoiding an even more unpleasant death.
Three more bullets tore into the ground in front of me. I veered right, circling the reservoir, making for the closest tree line as I tugged out my Beretta. More gunfire, right on my heels, and I ducked into the woods and put my back against the trunk of a large white pine. My best guess, taking into account the trajectory of the shots, was that the other sentry also hid in the same tree line, roughly fifty meters to the east.
The guard I’d killed had a radio. No doubt this one was calling for reinforcements. I could probably escape into the forest, take a roundabout way to Tequila, but that would take time, and soon he’d have guards all over him, same as me.
Our best chance, and Fleming’s, was for me to reach those ATVs.
So I ran. Not away from the sentry, but toward him.
Sunset was quickly approaching, and the thick canopy gave me enough shadows to hide in that I wasn’t an obvious target. After twenty meters, I still didn’t see the guard, so I stopped to listen.
The scream of hawks overhead. Some mosquitoes buzzing. Gunfire in the distance.
But nothing to give away the guard’s position.
Where was he?
I crept forward, gun at the ready, scanning a wide arc in front of me, stopping every few steps to listen.
Then I smelled it, faint but unmistakable, completely inappropriate for the environment.
Chocolate.
But where was it coming from?
I turned a slow circle, squinting into the woods.
Nothing.
Continuing east, the smell grew stronger. And it took on a musky note. A familiar, unpleasant musky note.
Was the sentry wearing that silly chocolate body spray that Harry had slathered himself in?
That’s when I heard a twig snap, directly above me.
I’d m
ade a rookie mistake, forgetting that ambushes could come from any direction, not just in front or behind. I managed to get my gun up just as he fell on top of me.
He hit me hard, an elbow to the top of my head, a gravity-fueled chop to my gun hand.
My Beretta spun away, into the bushes. I fell to my knees. Splashes of light burst behind my eyes. Dizziness swirled around me. But I managed to fight through the pain, surprise, and confusion, and had just enough awareness left to pull the sidearm from the holster on his belt, point it into his belly, thumb off the safety, and squeeze the trigger.
Click.
Empty. Which explained why he tried to jump me rather than shoot.
I saw the fist coming down, and I managed to lower my head so he hit the top of my skull. It hurt, but it probably hurt him just as much. I rolled backward with the punch, coming up on unsteady legs, and faced my attacker for the first time.
He was big. Pro wrestler big.
And boy, was he ugly. He had one of those pushed-in fat faces with the little piggy eyes that were too close together, the kind you’d associate with the progeny of cousins who marry.
No wonder he needed body spray. Maybe he was hoping to attract a blind woman…one who had a hankering for rancid chocolate.
I reached for the Ghost Hawk blade hanging around my neck, but only felt the chain; it had swung around to my back. Before I could grab it, Axe slammed into me with a football tackle—actually lifting me up off my feet.
Next thing I knew the wind was knocked out of me, and I was riding the world’s fugliest runaway train, smashing through bushes and brush, through the tree line, and plowing me into the fence surrounding the reservoir.
It would have crushed my ribs like pretzel sticks if the chain link hadn’t bowed inward, acting somewhat like a stiff safety net.
He continued to shove me, shoulder in my gut like he was pushing his football coach on a training sled. I couldn’t reach my ankle, but I did manage to pull the Ghost Hawk around and yank it free. It was a small weapon, no more than two ounces, a finger loop on the bare tang. The blade was shaped like bent trapezoid, with four edges to it and a hole in the center, sharp as hell. I dug it into his back until I scraped his shoulder blade.
Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Page 38