In that moment, Jonathan lost patience with the First Lady. Who was this confessed terrorist, no matter how reformed by time and privilege, to pass judgment on him for doing the job that she’d asked him to do? She wasn’t his precious cargo anymore. She’d surrendered that role the instant she chose to jump onto the boat and join a fight where she wasn’t welcome.
“Just keep up,” he said. “And consider yourself at weapons free. Take your safety off, keep your finger off the trigger, and shoot at anybody you don’t recognize.”
A panicked voice rasped from Jonathan’s pocket. “We have intruders in the compound! Oh my God, I don’t know how many they’ve killed. They’re in area four, headed south. I think they’re heading for the prisoners.”
“Hey, Boss,” Boxers said, “how about we talk less and move more?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
David sat in the woods on a fallen tree, waiting. For what, he wasn’t sure, but his chest heaved from the effort to run back to the truck, and then back to the water’s edge, this time with his body armor and rifle. He’d moved from the spot where he’d been seen the last time, but he was still in the same strip of trees. Saint Stephen’s Island lay less than a half mile away, across frigid water and an elevated roadway, and while it was so very, very close, it might as well have been on Mars. He’d never felt so isolated.
The caravan of trucks now looked like a string of red lights in the distance, lined up in single file along the front of the prison complex. This had to be for the transfer of the weapons. The timing was too perfect for it to be anything else.
He wished he’d checked his watch when the boat pulled away. He had no idea how much time had passed, but it felt like it had been way too long. Where was the explosion of the storage building? If it didn’t happen soon, the trucks would start leaving. And then what?
Well, he had a rifle, didn’t he? These people were trying to kill him; shouldn’t he be trying to kill them right back? If a truck got past him, who would be left to stop them before the weapons slipped into the United States? Sure, they could alert the authorities to look for moving and storage trucks, but who said the materials would stay in the trucks?
If these guys were smart—and as organized as they were, there was every reason to believe they were smart—they’d have cars staged all over the place into which they could transfer the weapons and explosives. Maybe some of them would get caught, but others wouldn’t.
He made up his mind right then that he would stop any trucks that tried to get past him. It was the right thing to do. It was a way for him to participate in the fight that had so much to do with his own survival.
If he didn’t freeze to death first. He was so desperately cold—not so much his torso because his coat and his vest took care of that—but his hands and feet ached with the cold, despite the gloves and boots. He’d lost feeling in his lips ages ago. Sitting on a snow-covered tree trunk didn’t help much.
He waited, staring out across the road and water at the behemoth of a building, wondering how many other benign buildings in North America—hell, around the world—harbored such evil secrets. If terrorists could gather en masse in the middle of a metropolis, what hope was there of ever stopping them?
He knew from his reporting that the FBI and the other alphabet agencies around the world did their best to track the organizations they knew about, but what about the ones they didn’t know about? Anybody with a cause and a knife could become a small-time terrorist. Anybody with a cause and connections could become the next Al Qaeda. These nut-jobs were like weeds, growing without limit, wherever they decided to take root.
David thought back to the cheering and political posturing that always attended the death of a high-profile terrorist, or the takedown of a known stronghold. He’d read the reports in his own newspaper extolling the success of American power over that of the bad guys, and the implication was that as the FBI or CIA rolled up that group or the other group, we were making progress against terror in the world, yet apparently, no one even knew about this group. How many others didn’t people know about?
These thoughts took him to a dark place in his gut. It was a hopeless place, one he’d never visited before, and definitely didn’t like. As a reporter, he understood that people needed to know about such things, but he also knew that they wouldn’t want to. For sure, Charlie Baroli wouldn’t print such a story. He’d want the proof, the evidence. But that was just the point: there was no proof or evidence for the unknown threat that we nonetheless know is present.
Jesus, how stupid can we be? In popular culture, we were so protective of our perceived security that we didn’t want to burst the bubble with a dose of reality. We were so concerned about hurting someone’s feelings that we won’t suspect obvious intent until the intent becomes reality. As a reporter, he felt terrible for having been a tool of that complacency.
It all felt like too much to process. It all made him feel ill.
He damn near fell off his log when every light in the prison came on at the same instant.
As he squinted through the cold to figure out what was going on, he realized that those weren’t the only lights added to the darkness. A vehicle was screaming through the night, headed right for him. It wasn’t one of the moving and storage trucks, but rather something smaller. Maybe a pickup or an SUV?
He wondered if Scorpion had already scared them into running. The thought amused him, though it begged the question of what he should do about it. It was one thing to shoot at a truck that he knew was loaded with explosives destined to kill innocent people, but absent that, wouldn’t shooting into a fleeing vehicle just be murder?
As he thought these things, he kept the safety engaged on his rifle. The last thing he wanted or needed was to fire off a shot accidentally.
The vehicle slowed as it approached, leading him to believe that they truly were fleeing, reducing speed to make the turn onto the Ottawa Parkway.
As it passed him, David saw that it was indeed an SUV, and it had more the one person inside. A whole group was running away.
Only they continued to slow. Finally, they stopped at the spot where David had been standing when he encountered the truck driver.
They were looking for him.
Len heard the unmistakable hammering of automatic weapons, and a moment later, the urgency of the tone on the radio confirmed his worst fears. “We have intruders in the compound! Good God, I don’t know how many they’ve killed.” In the background, he could hear the cries of the wounded.
Dmitri’s voice appeared on the radio just a moment later. “Two sentries have been shot. Their bodies are in the reception area.”
Len scanned his surveillance screens, looking for some indication of what was happening, but everything looked entirely normal.
Oh no. He felt his face flush. The reception hall showed normal. Area Four showed normal. Good God, this was a nightmare. Someone had hijacked their video feed. He was blind.
He felt the early signs of panic boiling up inside him. Too many thoughts swam through his head to process them quickly enough. That meant he needed to prioritize. He needed to think not just about the words he was hearing, but about their meaning. He inhaled deeply to calm himself, and then modulated his voice to be as calm as he could make it.
He brought his radio to his lips. “I understand two bodies in the reception area. Unit reporting intruders. Who are you?”
“Gregory Jones.”
Len recognized it as a cover name, but he didn’t remember who it was covering for. “Okay, Gregory, how many intruders are there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. The horrible cacophony of wailing men echoed in the background. “I didn’t get to see, but there must be many.”
A large and talented attack force could only mean the police, perhaps with the assistance of the military.
“Thomas to Central,” someone said. “What do you want me to do with all these trucks?”
“Central” was the radio designatio
n for the watch commander, but Len spoke up before he had a chance. “This is Len,” he said. “I am taking command. Dmitri, what do you see?” By now, he’d had plenty of time to get to the door of the chapel.
“I don’t see anyone,” Dmitri replied. “There’s another body in the hallway outside the chapel, and I smell smoke coming from Area Four, but I see no signs of intruders.”
How could that be?
Wait. Of course! This wasn’t about the weapons in the chapel. This was about the Mishins. That explains why they were in Area Four. That was the innermost part of the complex. Only the cell blocks lay within. That had to be where they were headed.
He switched to Russian for better radio security. (If his enemy could tap his security cameras, they could certainly listen in on his communication.) “Thomas, tell the drivers to start loading right away. Gregory, gather those who are capable, and all of you meet me at the base of the barracks stairs in three minutes.”
Grabbing an AK and a bandolier of ammunition, Len headed for his office door. He moved quickly down the spiral stone steps to what would have been a lovely reception area in the hotel that would now never exist. The stairway door, which would normally be dead bolted, lay open, no doubt because Dmitri had been in a hurry.
The front doors opened as he passed them, admitting three men dressed as anyone might be for the cold weather. Two of them wheeled hand trucks, but it was the third one who spoke. “Where—”
Len pointed. “Through those doors and then left,” he said.
The truck crew took a few steps, and then stopped as they all saw the dead sentries at the same time.
“Don’t worry about them,” Len said. “Just do your job, and do it quickly.”
“But what happened to them?”
“They didn’t do their jobs quickly enough,” Len said.
“What’s with the Russian on the radio all of a sudden?” Boxers asked.
“I think that means we’re made,” Jonathan said.
Yelena translated, “He told the trucks to start loading. Then he told people to wait at the base of the sleeping quarters for him.”
“Like I said,” Jonathan said. “I think we’re made”
They were hustling through a honeycomb of stone and steel. Jonathan had always found jails to be terrible, soul-stealing places, but this one was particularly bleak with its peeling paint and low ceilings. He recognized their location from the satellite photos as the oldest part of the prison—the original part. Building Delta sat at the end of this corridor, and somewhere in there sat their PCs.
“I don’t like that they’re loading the trucks,” Jonathan said.
“I’ve got the detonator right here,” Boxers said. “Say the word and I’ll ruin their whole day.”
Thanks to layer upon layer of stone walls, Jonathan was confident that they were far enough away from the explosion that it wouldn’t impact them, but he worried about the timing. For diversions to work their magic, the choreography had to go just right. They hadn’t even located the PCs yet. Did he want to blow stuff up now to buy more time to locate them, or did he want to wait until he had the Mishins in his custody and play his trump card during the exfil?
The deciding factor for him was the arrival of the trucks. If people started pulling stuff out of the chapel, there was a reasonable chance that they’d either discover or disconnect the charges they’d set.
“Go ahead,” Jonathan said.
Boxers grinned. “I love this part.”
“Why did they turn the lights on?” Josef asked with a start.
Nicholas thought the boy had been sleeping. Hoped he had. There was a certain irony, he supposed, to the fact that the only way to escape a living nightmare was to close your eyes and risk a sleeping nightmare. On a night like this, it was hard to tell the difference.
“I don’t know,” Nicholas said. “Maybe they have nighttime chores to do. Try to go back to sleep.”
The boy dug at his eyes with the backs of his hands. “It’s too bright.”
“That’s just because it was so dark before. It won’t look so bright in a few minutes.”
“I hear a bell, too,” the boy said. “Do you hear a bell?”
Nicholas pulled him closer. “We’ll be fine.” Nicholas had never felt so helpless. Josef had done nothing wrong.
In his heart, Nicholas knew that all of this had something to do with Tony Darmond. Whether he’d ordered them to be kidnapped—a wild stretch, even in the midst of panic—or they’d been kidnapped to hurt him, the president of the United States was at the heart of the Mishin family’s misery. Nicholas remembered the endless screaming matches between his mom and Tony back when he was a nobody and she was still trying to perfect her English and make something of herself.
He’d been young when they first found each other—maybe two or three years old—and he was five when they married. Never once—not for a single day—did Tony treat him as anything but the bastard stepchild that he was. Punishment regimens that were designed as household chores, whether painting fences or mowing the yard or bagging up dog shit in the back yard. Tony made sure that Nicholas would have no real friends because there was never time to hang out with them. As he got older, the chores morphed into jobs that were couched as opportunities to teach him responsibility.
Thinking these thoughts now reminded him of the single time he’d tried to voice them to his mother. The tasks all seemed so normal at their face—so character-building—that it was impossible to get others to realize the malevolence behind them. Nicholas could see it behind the bastard’s eyes when he gave the assignments, and he was confident that his mother saw it, too.
Yet she never intervened. Not once. It was always Tony’s way or the highway. Nicholas had always suspected that at one level, she was afraid of Tony. And the more power he gained, the more frightened she became.
So Nicholas had taken it upon himself to get even for a childhood full of nastiness. Nothing like a presidential candidacy to give a disgruntled stepson a bully pulpit for payback.
So, maybe this was payback for his payback. What better way to shut up the enemy than to pluck them out of their sleep and ship them off to someplace anonymous?
Sitting in the cold darkness—and now in the cold light—anger at Tony Darmond continued to be his most vicious inner demon. Worse, even, than his anger toward his jailers. At least they hadn’t hurt him yet, unless you counted the initial bruises, and in the warped logic of the moment, he was willing to write off those bruises as necessity.
The other dark demon was simply the unknown. Suppose the plan was to just leave them here—wherever here was—to starve to death or freeze? Suppose—
The unmistakable staccato beat of a machine gun made Nicholas and Josef jump in unison.
“Someone’s shooting,” Josef whined. He turned to look at his father. “Who’s shooting? What’s happening?”
Nicholas kissed the top of his son’s head. “I love you, Joey.”
The SUV disgorged five men, all armed with rifles affixed with flashlights. They rolled out of the vehicle quickly, and snapped their rifles up to their shoulders, ready to shoot anyone they saw. The formed a line, with maybe five feet separating each of them from the next nearest shooter, and rushed the tree line in a move that looked practiced.
David took advantage of the noise and dropped to the ground. Branches stabbed him on impact and snow jammed his mouth, but he wanted to make as small a silhouette as possible while still being able to see what they were up to.
Clearly, the driver had seen him, or had been spooked enough to sound an alarm. The spot to which they charged was precisely the one where he’d been standing when his radio had betrayed him. They scoured the area thoroughly, speaking in urgent, animated tones. He couldn’t hear the words, but the clipped syntax and the jerky movements of the muzzle lights made their meaning clear.
David pressed himself tighter to the ground and tried to maneuver his rifle for greatest mobility and flexibility,
but he’d managed to tangle the sling as he fell, and between the tangle and the underbrush, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to aim at a target from his belly.
What was Scorpion’s phrase for that? Oh, yeah. Spray and slay. Or, in his case, spray and pray.
One member of the group apparently saw something that interested him. In the flare of the other muzzle lights, David watched the guy point to the ground, and then the lights all moved in unison. They’d found his tracks in the snow.
David’s heart jumped. If they followed the tracks, they’d find the truck. If they found the truck, they’d find the trailer and through the trailer, they’d know that someone was coming at them by boat. If that happened, they’d know everything, and then all of this will have been for nothing.
The group started moving away, following exactly the path that David had worried about. There was something frightening—nearly unnatural—about the way they moved as one organism, not quite in lockstep, but certainly in unison, and with each step, they disappeared farther into the tangle of tree limbs and winter scrub. Two of them were already gone from view.
If David was going to do something to stop them, he had to do it now. It was time to either grow a pair or surrender the set he’d brought with him.
He stood to his full height, untangled himself from the sling, and snapped his rifle to his shoulder. Without looking, his thumb moved the selector from safe to single-shot. He settled the red dot that only he could see on the silhouette of the last person in the line and he squeezed the trigger.
The muzzle flash was at least as bright as the gunshot was loud. It blinded him before he could see if his target dropped, but that didn’t matter. Hitting the guy would have been nice, but marksmanship was secondary at this point. The real point of the shot was to divert their attention.
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