“Hey, Sidesaddle,” Jonathan said. “Come over here.”
She hesitated.
“I’m not going to throw you overboard. I promise.”
“I don’t like the name Sidesaddle,” she said as she approached.
“We’re not really going to compare notes on what we don’t like now, are we?” Boxers said.
Jonathan beckoned her closer still. “How many spare mags did I give you back there?”
“Ten, I think.”
“It’d be a good thing to know.”
She squeezed the pouches on her vest. “Ten.”
“Good.”
“You ready, Boss?” Boxers asked.
“Let’s go,” Jonathan said. He blinked against the cold. The wind, even as light as it was, carried ice crystals that felt like as many needles against his exposed flesh. “Just take it slow, and keep the approach wide.”
The boat ran blacked out. He’d intentionally chosen a boat that would not stand out in a crowd of boats, but since it was winter, cold as hell, they were the only boat on the water, and that made them potentially easy to see. The plan was to stay as dark and silent as possible.
Saint Stephen’s Island was likewise dark, except for the lights in the buildings’ windows. If the moon and the stars hadn’t been so bright, it would be the perfect conditions for an assault.
“There’s an eye in the door,” Joey said. He knew that Dad had fallen asleep, but he didn’t want to be alone. After the sun had gone down, their tiny cell had filled with the kind of cold that left you feeling weak. At one point during the afternoon, the heavy blanket had become too heavy. Now it might as well have been a sheet. Even with the heavy sweat suit, he might as well have been naked.
Dad stirred, but he didn’t wake entirely. Joey poked him with an elbow.
Dad jumped, startled and maybe a little frightened. “What? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” Joey said. “I just changed positions. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
They sat on the floor together, their bodies touching for extra warmth, with double layers of blankets separating their butts from the floor, as well as covering them all over. It was like the world’s smallest tent.
“That’s okay,” Dad said. “I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep.”
“Isn’t it dangerous to fall asleep in the cold? I thought I read that somewhere. Maybe I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”
“Hmm. I don’t think it’s that cold.”
“There’s an eye in the door,” Joey said again.
Moon and starlight seeped into the room, keeping it from being completely black.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Look at the door. At the peephole.” He pointed with his forehead because he didn’t want to expose an arm. “It’s got an eye around it.”
Dad squinted, and then said, “Ah. I see it. Back in the old days, punishment had religious overtones. I imagine that that was supposed to make people think of the eye of God watching them.”
Joey stewed on that for a few seconds, but the thought troubled him. “Shouldn’t they have put it on the ceiling? That’s where heaven is.”
Dad smiled. “That would make more sense, wouldn’t it?”
They fell into silence again. There’d been a lot of that. Not that there was anything to talk about.
Conversation took some of the edge off his fear, but the only thing he could think to talk about was how afraid he was.
“Did I tell you that Jimmy Feeny got expelled from school?”
Dad rocked back with surprise. “Big Jimmy? The one who used to paint his mohawk? Why does that not surprise me?”
Joey nodded. Jimmy was one of the cool kids—a member of the class that Joey himself could only aspire to—even though teachers and parents didn’t like him very much. Or maybe because teachers and parents didn’t like him very much.
Joey explained. “In the cafeteria, Norman Kwit-niesky walked past him and dumped a thing of chocolate milk on his head, and Jimmy broke his face.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because Norman dumped milk on him.”
“But why would Norman dump the milk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jimmy’s a big kid. Sounds like Norman has a death wish. Did he get expelled, too?”
“No, and that’s what pisses everybody off. He started the fight, and he only got like a few days’ suspension.”
“Huh.”
And then the silence returned.
Joey shivered, and his dad pulled him tighter. That’s when the tears came. They heaved up out of nowhere, burning his eyes and tightening his throat. It was a flood of emotion, and he didn’t know how to stop it. A squeaking sound escaped his throat, and after that, they were followed by sobs.
He buried his face in Dad’s shirt, and felt fingers gently rubbing the back of his head, the way Dad used to do it.
“I’m so scared,” he said, but the words might have been lost in the cough of a sob.
“I swear to you this will be okay,” Dad said. “I won’t let them hurt you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The release on the trailer hitch didn’t want to let go. The latch had frozen shut, and no matter how hard David pulled, he couldn’t get the lever to lift. “Unbelievable.” Will anything go right tonight?
He pressed his transmit button. “Hey, Mother Hen.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re not going to believe this. The trailer hitch is frozen. I can’t release it.”
A pause.
“And before you ask, I don’t have a hammer, and as far as I can tell, this truck doesn’t have any tools on board. Everything that was heavy and solid is out there on the boat.”
When Mother Hen’s voice returned to his ear, he could hear a smile in it. “Wolverine wants to know how full your bladder is.”
What the hell kind of stupid question—
Then he got it. Pee on the latch. Not the most dignified solution, but there was a certain elegance to it. Plus there was the whole thing of killing two birds with one stone.
And it worked. The hitch was still steaming when he used his gloved hand to release the latch. Memo to file: throw the gloves away. That done, the trailer lifted easily off the ball. He gave it a little shove to impart momentum, and then watched as it drifted into the water . . . and stopped two feet from shore.
Screw it. He keyed his mike. “I’m free of the trailer. Now I’m on my way to save the day.”
As he walked carefully through the snow to the front of the truck, he wondered if there’d be DNA or something in the yellow snow that would connect him to this night.
Then he realized it was silly to worry. He’d probably be dead before dawn.
The vest he wore over his coat was as bulky and uncomfortable in the front seat as it had been in the back, but he kept it on. The imagery that Scorpion had conjured as he explained the ballistic trenches that bullets carved through human flesh still lingered vividly in his mind.
The seat was as far back as it could go to accommodate Big Guy, and with the vest in place, David couldn’t reach to the floor between his legs to get to the adjustment bar. Muttering a curse, he climbed back outside to make the adjustment from a spot next to the door. When he was done, the seat was probably still going to be too far back, but he’d find a way to deal with it.
Finally settled into his seat, grateful that they’d let the engine and its heater continue to run, he pulled the transmission lever into drive and stepped on the gas.
Nothing happened. The engine whined louder and the tachometer climbed, but the truck itself didn’t move.
“You have to be friggin’ kidding me.” He was stuck in the snow.
Don’t panic. You’ve been stuck before.
He pulled the transmission lever all the way to the right, to low, and tried to be more gentle on the gas. With the slightest application of torque, the rear wheel spun as if it were . . . well, as i
f it were on ice.
With a flash of inspiration, he searched for the lever that would engage the four-wheel drive. There was none.
“Are you shitting me?” he yelled to the car’s interior. He pressed the radio button. “Hey Mother Hen. You there?”
“Go ahead.”
“Who’s the genius that ordered up a rear-wheel-drive truck?”
Silence. Then: “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Yeah,” David said. “I’m friggin’ kidding you because that’s what I do when I’m about to get caught in the middle of a shit storm. No, I’m not kidding! When we came out here, we were about a thousand pounds heavier than I am now. The bed of the truck is empty, the tires are on ice, and this puppy isn’t moving. And please don’t tell me to take a shit in the snow, because I really don’t see how that could help.”
“Stand by.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said off the air. “I’ll stand by. Because, you know, there’s no other goddamn option!” He slammed the steering wheel with his hand. He tried the gas again, pressing a little harder this time. The result was to move sideways and drift closer to the water. He took his foot off entirely.
“Shit.”
Boxers had just cut the throttles to coast into the shore when Venice delivered the news that the truck was stuck in Ottawa and would not be able to make the rendezvous in Quebec. The news knotted Jonathan’s gut.
He looked to Big Guy. “I say we’re in too deep to abort now,” he whispered.
“You’re damn right we’re not aborting,” Yelena said. Under the circumstances, Jonathan had granted permission to join them on channel one.
“Hush,” Jonathan said. “You don’t get a vote, and keep your voice down.”
Boxers said, “I think it’s tonight or it’s not at all.”
Jonathan acknowledged with a nod. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Y’all need to get us an exfil alternative, and you need to do it quickly. Wake up Striker and get him back in the game. If nothing else works, he’ll be able to pluck us out of the boat in the river.”
Jonathan let up on the transmit button and looked to Boxers. “Are you ready?”
“I’m always ready to make noise.”
Jonathan keyed his mike. “We’re going hot.”
Jonathan turned to Yelena. “Your job is to do exactly what I tell you, exactly when I tell you to do it. You don’t shoot at anything unless it shoots at you first, understand?”
She nodded. At last, that hard emotionless mask had started to crack. There might actually have been some fear in her eyes. Jonathan was happy to see it.
“I need you to say it,” he pressed.
“I understand.”
Jonathan continued. “If all else fails, stay low. Big Guy and I have night vision, you don’t. If you go completely blind, say something and we’ll stop. Do not turn on a light unless I tell you to. Got it?”
“Yes.”
He gave her a harder look, testing those eyes, then decided she was as stable as she was going to be.
“Okay, Big Guy, let’s go.”
Barely moving the throttles an inch, Boxers drove the boat up to the edge of the ice line, and then surged the engines once to run the bow aground. He kept the throttles engaged as Jonathan moved around the cockpit to the bow, where he grabbed the once-coiled thirty-foot line and stepped gingerly out onto the ice. With all the crap he was wearing, if he fell through, he would become the anchor.
The ice held. Jonathan suspected that the ice was really just snow-covered ground, which meant that they were lucky not to have broken off the motors’ propellers. Waddling across the snow at a crouch, he made his way to a young but sturdy-looking tree, and tied the rope around its trunk. Behind him, the engines cut off.
By the time he turned around, Boxers was helping the First Lady out of the boat and onto the ground. Ever the grouch, he was likewise always the gentleman.
Their designated entry point into the walled compound was the main entrance, an iron gate in the middle of the north-south wall, a hike of about a hundred yards. They moved along the western coast of the island, where the gentle slope down to the water gave them complete defilade from anyone who was not standing on the roof of the building. And after scanning the roofline carefully with a digital monocular, Jonathan determined that no one was.
When his GPS told him that he was directly across from the main gate, he beckoned for Boxers to follow him. “You stay there,” he said to Yelena.
Adjusting their equipment to stay out of the way, Jonathan and Boxers moved in unison to drop to their bellies and crawl the last fifty feet or so of the incline. Even the most bored, inattentive of sentries would be attracted to a pair of black silhouettes moving against the horizon.
They lifted their NVGs out of the way so they could survey the area more closely with their monoculars. The amount of ambient light, reflected as it was off the snow, gave them a pretty clear view.
River Road lay between them and the gate, and the far edge of the road passed within fifteen feet of the outermost wall. The front gates were not nearly as imposing as Jonathan had expected, consisting of wrought-iron spikes that rose not quite to the height of the twelve-foot stone walls. And they were wide open. A courtyard lay beyond the gate, measuring sixty feet wide by thirty feet deep. Two massive doors blocked entrance to the main building—building Foxtrot—on the far side of the courtyard.
“You suppose those big doors are locked?” Boxers whispered.
“Nothing a GPC can’t handle,” Jonathan said. A GPC—general purpose charge—was a block of C4 explosive with a det cord tail. Jonathan liked to think of them as skeleton keys. They guaranteed entry to anyplace he wanted to go.
“I count two sentries,” Jonathan said. Both stood inside the courtyard, flanking the big doors. They stomped their feet as if they’d been standing in the cold for a long time. “I see AKs—no surprise there—but no sign of body armor. You concur?”
“I concur.”
The other sentries they’d seen in the satellite photos patrolled areas inside the compound walls.
“Then let’s go to work,” Jonathan said. He flipped the NVGs back down and brought the extended stock of the MP7 tight against his shoulder. He’d outfitted the weapon with an infrared laser sight, the beam from which would be invisible to anyone who did not have night vision. At this range, the sight guaranteed a kill.
“You take the guy on the left,” Jonathan whispered. “I’ve got the guy on the right.”
“Rog.”
“In three, two, one.”
The weapons fired in unison, one shot each, emitting a pop that sounded more like a firecracker than a gunshot, and launching a tiny 4.6 millimeter bullet at 2,300 feet per second. The targets died in unison. They were already falling before the sound of the gunshots made it halfway across the road.
“Let’s go,” Jonathan said. He turned to beckon Yelena forward, but she had clearly heard him and was already on her way. When she joined them, Jonathan said, “Think of yourself as my shadow. Do what I do, but don’t shoot unless I tell you to.”
This time, he didn’t wait for an answer.
Boxers moved out first, just as far as the near edge of the road, where he took a knee, and, with his weapon to his shoulder, he scanned an arc from left to right. “Clear,” he said.
Jonathan moved next. He grabbed Yelena by her vest to get her going, but then let go as he led her past Boxers and then all the way across the road to the left-hand edge of the gate wall. “Stay,” he said to Yelena, and then he pivoted into the courtyard to scan for any threats they night have missed. Seeing none, he keyed his mike. “Clear.” He motioned Yelena to come closer.
Five seconds later, Boxers was back with them. “I hate it when things start easy,” he said. Call it warriors’ pessimism, but this was a classic way to pull your opponent into a trap. You give them all the encouragement they need to keep moving forward, and then you let them have it when they’re in too deeply to retreat.
Jonathan turned to address Yelena and saw that she was staring at the dead sentry who lay at her feet. The sentry seemed to stare back at her. Jonathan rapped on her helmet to get her attention and she jumped. “If you see somebody with a weapon, you say ‘gun to the right’ or wherever they are, and Big Guy and I will take him out. Your weapon is too loud. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“And to think that I actually had to train for years to master this shit,” Boxers grumbled.
Jonathan brought his weapon back to his shoulder and nodded to the six-inch ring that served as the knob for the enormous door. “Just how easy is it?”
The ring turned and the door floated open. “Too,” Big Guy said.
“Yelena, stay till we call for you.” To Boxers, “You call it.”
“Three, two, one.” Boxers pushed the door open all the way. Following their long-standing protocol, Jonathan went in low and turned to the left while Boxers went in high and turned to the right.
The doors opened onto a wide stone vestibule that Jonathan guessed might have been a processing area back in the day, or maybe a waiting room for visiting relatives. More a part of the structure of the wall than of the prison it surrounded, the vestibule was devoid of furniture and was dimly lit by only a single bulb that dangled from the ceiling. The prominent feature of the room was another door on the far side, directly across from the one they’d just entered.
Jonathan turned back toward the courtyard, where the First Lady stood in the doorway. “Yelena, come in.”
As she stepped inside, her eyes never stopped scanning. It was as if she was trying to memorize everything she saw.
When she cleared the jamb, Jonathan and Boxers moved around her to drag the dead sentries inside. With luck, if they were noted to be missing, no one would see the blood slicks. They laid the bodies side by side in the middle of the room, and Jonathan went back to shut the doors. With the panel closed, Jonathan could see the locking mechanism that was clearly designed to keep people out rather than in. Foot-long steel bars slid into matching keepers on the opposite panel—four of them in total, at eye, chest, belt, and knee level. Boxers started to push one of them home, but Jonathan stopped him.
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