The Trade of Kings

by Mike Kraus

  “Well, thank you. We appreciate it.”

  An uncomfortable silence descended in the hall until Jane finally broke it by stepping out of the back room and lowering her weapon. “Quick suggestion—how about we get out of the murder chamber in here and go talk outside, where there isn’t a pile of bodies and blood on the floor?”

  Chapter 9

  The Waters’ Homestead

  Outside Ellisville, VA

  Streaks of fire soared through the air as the glass bottles filled to the neck with gasoline tumbled end over end from the woods. The first bottle exploded prematurely as its thrower was not nearly as accurate as he could have been. It hit a tree a few meters in front of him, sending flames in all directions, including onto two men who were hiding nearby.

  Two more bottles fell short of the house, shattering on the gravel drive and sending their flames out across stone and dirt, only to die off a short time later. The last two bottles were sent flying straight and true, though, with one landing on the roof and the other smashing against the side. Bright orange flames burst forth just below the upstairs window, and a wave of heat drove Tina and Dianne back as the flaming liquid burst out away from the house, tumbling down the siding. The flames found no purchase, though, and soon extinguished themselves.

  The bottle on the roof didn’t actually break, and instead rolled back down, gaining enough speed that it tumbled out into the driveway, sending a fresh burst of flames up into the air but damaging nothing in the process.

  The entirety of the attack was brief, taking no more than ten seconds from start to finish, but to Dianne it appeared as though everything was happening in slow motion. As she and Tina ducked away from the flames beneath the window, a smattering of gunfire emerged from the woods, tearing holes in the side of the house. Only a few of the rounds penetrated through, but the number of weapons firing and the sound of them hitting the wood was enough to both terrify and enrage Dianne.

  “Return fire!” Dianne shouted into her radio and stood in full view of the window, jamming the butt of her rifle against her shoulder. She used the bright flashes of light amongst the darkness of the trees to her advantage, lashing out with three and five round bursts at each flash. Only when the bolt slammed open and the trigger fell with a hollow click beneath her finger did she drop back down and scurry over to Tina who was standing on the other side of the room, performing the same actions at another group.

  “How many’d you hit?” Dianne shouted at Tina over the gunfire and shouts coming from both outside and inside the house.

  “No idea! Someone downstairs hit at least three, though; I saw them drop out there near the edge of the woods!”

  “I hit two, maybe three or four.” Dianne winced as the glass on the windows where she had been standing shattered under a barrage of bullets. “We need to get out of here; they’re focusing their fire upstairs!”

  Both women dropped to the floor and crawled out as the gunfire from outside the house intensified. As Dianne followed Tina out into the hall, she glanced back at the bedroom, watching as more holes appeared in the walls, letting moonlight in to illuminate swirling masses of dust and particles of wood, drywall and insulation. The last three days had been filled with thoughts in the back of her mind about what might happen if the gang from the gas station were to find her home. Everything from minor structural damage to all of the buildings being burned to the ground along with the loss of all of their supplies and animals.

  No matter what scenarios she came up with, though, they all ended with the same thought. We will win. Losing her friends and family was never an option, even in her darkest moments, and even while the bullets passed by and her home was slowly being torn apart, she did not waver in that thought. Fear, swirling deep within her gut, was quickly being replaced by another emotion that was far, far stronger.

  Anger.

  It was her home. It was her family. It was hers. And she would, without a doubt, ensure that everything stayed that way, come hell or high water.

  “Tina?”

  The older woman looked back at Dianne, the same fire burning in her eyes that Dianne had in her own. “What is it?”

  “It’s time to punch some holes in their chests.”

  Tina’s pearly teeth glinted in the moonlight streaming in from a nearby window as she smiled, her expression filled with glee. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  ***

  While the three days in between Dianne’s return from the LTAC and the arrival of the two men attempting to loot one of the barns had been spent quietly watching and waiting, that wasn’t the only thing that they had done.

  Once Jason had started to make his recovery, he and Dianne had spent several hours talking with Sarah, Tina and Mark about the ways in which the property was protected against possible attacks. While Jason agreed that the property was set up in the most defensive and defensible way possible, he pointed out that they were sorely lacking in offensive capabilities. In case of an attack they could defend the house easily enough or, if necessary, escape through the tunnel out into the woods, but he was incredibly unsatisfied with that given the dangers that were threatening to descend upon them.

  On the afternoon of the second day, while everyone else was either outside patrolling, cleaning weapons or was otherwise engaged, Jason had worked with Mark and Jacob in the living room while he was propped up on the couch. A pile of shotgun shells, springs, nails, wooden blocks and other odds and ends were combined with a car battery and lengths of wire, and by the next morning Dianne had woken to the sound of a muffled shotgun blast. After a few minutes of panicked searching for the source, they had gone down into the basement to find Jason slowly walking up the stairs from the tunnel with a grin on his face and the smell of gunpowder heavy in the air.

  The remotely triggered traps were crude, prone to accidental discharge and nothing to look at, but they worked. A simple spring mechanism held three nails in tension a short distance from the back of a trio of shotgun shells inside of a small wooden box. The simple press of a button released the nails, which punched into the primer of the shells and set them off. Jason’s first test with a single shell had been a success. While there were a few failures as he worked to set up the multi-shell devices, by the end of the nearly days-long tinkering process he was satisfied with the low failure rate of the traps and made his suggestion to Dianne that they rig as many as they could throughout the woods around the house.

  Dianne had been hesitant to set traps in the woods, both out of fear for the safety of everyone at the house and because she wasn’t sure if that type of thing was where she wanted to go. Staging a rescue and fighting for medication to save the lives of family or friends was one thing, but setting traps in her backyard took everything to the next level. A frank talk from Tina had convinced her, though, and they soon rigged dozens of the devices in the trees, all wired in various groups that could be triggered in tandem. The dead leaves made it easy to conceal the wires and in the thick, overgrown woods, it was difficult to see the small boxes containing the shells during the day. At night, seeing them would be nigh-on impossible.

  Jason had initially wanted to place them at chest level, but while Dianne, Tina and Mark were outside working, they decided that rigging the traps at staggered heights would be best for maximum coverage and dispersal. The three shells inside each small box were angled in slightly different directions, and that combined with the lack of a barrel to guide the projectiles meant that the field of fire of the traps was incredibly wide, but only deadly at a short distance. Two buckshot shells and one loaded with birdshot went into each trap, with the idea being that if the traps couldn’t necessarily kill someone, they could at least give them a very, very bad day. That, combined with the fact that Jason had thousands of buckshot shells that they had brought over to Dianne’s house when he and Sarah moved in, meant that it was the best choice for the traps.

  While Jason’s experiments and tinkering know-how had proven that the concept would w
ork, the only way to know whether or not they would work on a large scale against an invading force would be to test them in battle.

  ***

  “Jason!” Dianne stood on her toes to peek out through a crack in the boards covering the small windows above the front door. “Trigger the first group; right outside the front of the house!”

  A moment’s pause followed Dianne’s cry, and she wondered if Jason had dropped his radio in the dash to get downstairs. Just as she was about to shout in the radio again, a sound like a thousand firecrackers exploded from the woods out in front of the house. Cries of pain accompanied the sounds, which came in bursts as Jason touched pairs of wires to the terminals on a car battery down in the basement. Each new pair of wires set off another group of traps, and even through the thick front door Dianne could hear what the men in the woods were saying.

  “What the hell?! Somebody’s shooting!”

  “Where are they? Where are they?!”

  “Right in front of us! It came from there!”

  “My eyes! They got me in my eyes!”

  “It has to be coming from the house!”

  “No, it’s—aagh!”

  Another burst of explosions cut off what the man was saying, and Tina leapt past Dianne, bounding back up the stairs to peer out the window. “Nice work, Jason!” She called through the radio for both Jason and Dianne to hear. “They’re scattering out front!”

  “Did it kill any of them?” Dianne asked.

  “Looks like maybe one. Hard to tell in this light, but they’re scattering hard!”

  “Mark, Sarah; how’s it looking out there?”

  “Nothing out to the side, mom; I think they pulled back. It looked like they were running out toward the front.”

  “Back’s still quiet,” called Sarah.

  “Good.” Dianne nodded firmly. “Now we make our message loud and clear. Jason, can you see where they are on the cameras?”

  “There’s a decent-sized group near the road. They’re about to be passing right by another cluster of traps.”

  “Good. Trigger it when they’re right next to them. I want as many dead or maimed as possible.” In the other room, Mark looked down at his radio with wide eyes. Hearing his mother talking about killing and injuring people wasn’t something he was used to, and hearing it described in such coarse, matter-of-fact terms was yet another reminder of how much the world had changed.

  Several seconds of silence followed Dianne’s command, and she stood still next to the door with her ear pressed up against the wood with her eyes closed, waiting for the sound of more staccato explosions. In the basement, Jason watched the tablet closely, sweat beading down his forehead, onto his face and down his neck despite the cold temperature. Though the images from the outside cameras weren’t the best quality, he knew from Dianne’s detailed descriptions where the traps were, and he could see the vague movements of the men who were moving down the driveway, helping their injured comrades as they tried to maneuver around the nail boards.

  The explosions and screams came quickly and with no warning. Dianne jumped at the sound, startled despite expecting it, and pressed her ear harder against the door. Though she couldn’t see anything and could only hear vague outlines of what was being said, the counterattack had been an unparalleled success based on what she could make out. Near-simultaneous calls from Tina upstairs and Jason watching the monitor in the basement confirmed her assumption.

  “They’re running wild, Dianne!”

  “Yes they are!” Tina pumped her fist in excitement. “You got at least three more with the traps!”

  Dianne closed her eyes, her shoulders slumping with relief and exhaustion. “Does anyone see any sign of them anymore? Mark? Sarah?”

  “Nothing here, mom. Everything looks quiet in the woods and side yard.”

  “Nothing here either, Dianne. They never went out back, at least as far as I could see.”

  “Good. I want everyone to stay where you are and keep an eye out. It’ll be dawn in a few hours and we can head out then to take stock of the damage to the house and to their numbers.” Dianne took a deep breath. She was fighting against sleep deprivation and the quickly-depleting adrenaline in her system and wanted nothing more than to lie down on the floor and close her eyes. There was still much to be done, though, and she suspected that in spite of the losses suffered by the gang, they wouldn’t give up quite so easily.

  Chapter 10

  Washington, D.C.

  Half an hour later, after moving outside and standing near the car in the middle of the compound, the group of seven were talking like they were old friends. The two Spetsnaz officers gravitated toward Rick, eagerly absorbing details from him about how Damocles had progressed in the United States while providing similar information on its progression in Russia. Jane stood near Rick, Ostap and Carl, watching them talk while Dr. Evans found himself pummeled with questions from Oles and Jacob. The two technicians acted as though they had just met their childhood hero and Dr. Evans wondered if the pair might not end up wetting themselves out of excitement.

  “So you all are looking to just… shut this thing down?” Jane directed her inquiry at Ostap during a lull in the conversation between him, Jacob and Rick.

  “Indeed,” he replied, nodding at her. “We and so many others have suffered greatly from this, as has your country. I will admit that we all thought this to be somewhat of a suicide mission, but providence has decided to smile upon us.”

  “Rick? Jane?” Dr. Evans and the two technicians strode up to the others. “We need to work with them. They’ve already checked the northern-most site and it didn’t have any signs of the servers we’d need to access. With four more people we can scour the last two sites and find the location quite easily.”

  “We should start by checking this site out, right?” Jane asked.

  “Absolutely,” Oles replied, “the buildings here are intact and it won’t take long to break through whatever physical security has been erected, if this is actually the location. Did you all have a plan for how to access the servers with this lack of power?”

  “What was your plan?” Jane replied before Rick or Dr. Evans could jump in.

  Oles craned his arm to tap the top of his backpack. “Solar-powered forensic machines. Hardened against EMPs and completely devoid of integrated networking. The only way they can communicate with the outside world is if we explicitly make a physical connection.”

  Dr. Evans nodded in surprise and approval. “Excellent! Our vehicle’s outfitted with an inverter that’ll give enough juice to power a server or three. It sounds like, together, we’ll be able to access whatever systems we encounter!” The smile rapidly vanished from his face and he sighed. “Assuming that there’s a way to bypass the local encryption that’s no doubt been applied to the systems.”

  Rick patted Dr. Evans’ back and smiled at him. “Cheer up; where there’s a will, there’s a way. Besides, if three Americans and four Russians can’t beat this, who can?”

  Dr. Evans nodded and Rick turned to Ostap. “So, with this being one of the locations, we should check it out. Do you have any equipment you need to gather before we take off?”

  “No. Everything we have, we carry on our backs.”

  “Well,” Rick chuckled, “what are we waiting for? We’ll grab our gear from upstairs and then we can get started searching this compound. Hopefully it’s here, but if not, we’ll just head to the last location.”

  “Excellent.” Ostap nodded, then looked at Carl and the two technicians. “Carl and I will secure the gate and perform a perimeter sweep. Oles and Jacob, you two stay here.”

  The group split up, with Rick, Jane and Dr. Evans heading back into the building where they did their best to ignore the bodies on the floor as they headed upstairs to retrieve their gear. Oles and Jacob stayed in the parking lot near the police car, talking in low voices about the technical details involved in accessing the systems they anticipated finding.

  Ostap and Carl
, walking together, headed down the drive to the entrance to the compound where they closed the gate and began securing it in place so that it couldn’t be easily opened again from the outside. They spoke quietly as they worked, not wanting either the technicians nor the new trio to hear what they discussed. They lingered for several minutes at the gate as they spoke, occasionally gesturing to the compound or to each other, before nodding and turning to head back up toward the buildings.

  Jane, who upon retrieving her gear had moved to the far end of the building, stared out the window at the pair, shaking her head slowly as they sauntered back up the drive, their rifles loosely held in their hands. “I don’t like this,” she whispered to herself.

  “Don’t like what?” Jane started at the voice behind her and turned to see Rick standing behind her, watching out the window as well.

  Jane turned and shook her head as she started walking out of the room. “It’s… nothing.”

  Rick reached out and took her arm, stopping her and looking her dead in the eyes. “If you think something’s wrong—anything—I need you to tell me, okay?”

  Jane started to speak, stopped, let out a sigh, shook her head and rubbed her eyes, trying to come up with a way to say what she was thinking about without sounding insane. “You… you know how you helped me, back in Vegas?”

  Rick snorted in amusement. “It hasn’t been that long. Of course I remember.”

  “Why did you help me? What was it about me that made you trust me enough to let your guard down and help me instead of leaving me there?”

  Rick furrowed his brow and pursed his lips as he pondered the question. “I suppose… well, you needed help. And you seemed trustworthy enough.”

  “When we got out of that casino, before the military took us to the base, I had plenty of opportunities to run. I didn’t, though. You want to know why?”

  Rick shrugged. “I’m not sure I follow all of this, but sure; why?”