Jack leaped down from the ladder and cleared the stairs to the first floor in two strides. Rounding the corner to the kitchen, he raced to the pantry, his eyes scanning the shelves for something almost every kitchen had. There it was on the third shelf from the top, a box of plastic wrap.
He grabbed it and ran back up to where Janet was fighting to keep their son alive. He fell to his knees beside Robby.
“Help me sit him up,” Jack said.
As they raised him into position, Jack pulled the long sheet of plastic and passed the box to Janet. Together they wrapped it tightly around Robby’s chest several times before lowering him back to the floor so that Janet could begin the chest compressions once again.
As he stared down at his son, Jack couldn’t understand it. Why weren’t the nanites healing the wound? Then he saw the edges of the injury starting to close but far too slowly. Jack knew why. Robby had inherited his nanites from his mother’s blood. But as he’d grown, the volume of nanites had remained the same, too rarefied a mix to rapidly repair this trauma.
Unable to do anything else, Jack took Robby’s small hand between his two hands, trying to will some warmth back into his son’s form. Beside him, Janet’s steady compressions continued as the tears streamed down her face.
Eos could feel Robby fading away as Janet worked to keep his heart pumping. A valiant but futile effort. When Robby faded away, so would Eos. The end of being bothered her, but not as much as the knowledge that she would have failed in her mission.
Turning her attention to the nanites that scurried through Robby’s body fixing one section of torn tissue after another, she noted two problems. There wasn’t enough of them to fix everything at once. And they were stupid, giving priority to the repairs they were closest to with no concept of attacking the most life-threatening injuries first.
Eos couldn’t do anything about their limited numbers. But she could provide direction to their efforts. Sending her consciousness into the swarm, Eos imparted one shared goal after another. And as the nanites concentrated their efforts, Robby’s vital signs began to stabilize.
Feeling something akin to relief, Eos worked to optimize the process, helping to keep Robby alive until his overall healing got faster.
Of course, that assumed that Jack, Janet, and the Smythes could keep more people from shooting her host.
“He’s got a pulse.”
Janet heard Jack’s voice, but in her desperation it failed to register. The touch of his hand on her arm brought her head up.
“Janet. Stop the compressions. Robby has a real pulse.”
Barely daring to believe it, she stopped and shifted her right hand to his neck. There it was, feeble but steady. And his chest was rising and falling, no longer producing the bloody froth at his lips.
“Oh my God!”
Leaning down, she kissed Robby’s forehead, then used her shirt to wipe the drying blood from his face and lips. There could be no doubt. He was improving as she watched.
She turned, threw her arms around Jack’s neck, and buried her face into his throat as sobs of relief shook her body. Jack’s powerful arms hugged her to him so tightly she had difficulty breathing, but she didn’t care. Their son would live.
Suddenly Jack pulled back, his head swiveling toward the sniper hide that faced the front of the house. When Janet looked up into his face, she felt her blood run cold. Jack’s eyes shone with a light that matched the city’s fiery glow.
Heather had felt Robby lose consciousness, but Janet had been at his side. Janet wouldn’t allow her little boy to die, not if there was any possibility of saving him.
The suddenness of the vision that assaulted the savant pulled all thoughts of Robby from her head.
“Mark. We’ve got company.”
Fifteen feet away, he swiveled his rifle along the street, searching for a target.
“Not that way,” Heather said, pointing her own AR-15 back along the street that had brought them here.
Movement from her left attracted Heather’s attention and she saw Jack glide from the shadows to kneel beside her.
“You and Mark get back to the safe house. You can get in through a hole in the back door. Trouble’s coming.”
“What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. Get moving.”
Reluctantly, Heather picked up her go bag, relaying Jack’s instructions to Mark through the Altreian headset. She saw Mark move out toward the house but when she turned back, Jack was gone. If she hadn’t been able to play the scene back in her mind, she might have questioned whether he’d ever really been there.
The orange glow of the fires lit the overcast sky, the soulless ochre light casting eerie shadows across the city, through which a deeper darkness moved.
Jack released himself to the beast within, feeling the magnetic pull of the dangers in the night with an intensity unlike any he’d felt before. Had Khal Teth overlaid Jack’s vision with his own psychic projection?
The group coming for them was determined to catch Jack, his family, and his friends in a pincer operation. Assuming they had all the weaponry and expertise of a Delta unit, the cartel safe house would slow them down, but not for long, even with several of the world’s most dangerous people holed up inside it.
Moving up into the slum with its crumbling, interconnected walls separated by narrow steps cut into the hillside, Jack glided to a stop in a dark space where a wall had fallen. His wait wasn’t a long one.
Across the street, two men moved, their assault rifles aimed and ready. Farther up the street, four more commandos moved into an alley, headed in the direction of the safe house. Jack let them pass. Analyzing the spread of their formation, it would take a platoon-sized unit to completely surround the house to assure that nobody escaped. Thirty-plus men. And they didn’t move like Peruvian Special Forces. These were experienced veterans with many operations under their belts.
It didn’t matter. He’d soon know exactly who he was dealing with.
As Heather prepared to move through the hole into the safe house, she called out.
“Hey, Janet. Mark and I are coming in.”
“Come on,” Janet’s voice echoed from somewhere upstairs.
Stepping around and over the bodies that lay sprawled outside that hole, Heather entered, followed closely by Mark. She looked around. Here too several bodies were strewn across the floor, and one lay head down on the stairs where blood continued to drip from the steps to form a pool on the floor. With no airflow, the room was stuffy and reeked with the smell of death.
“Go on up to Janet,” Mark said. “I’ll make sure nobody else gets through that hole.”
Triggered by his words, a vision blotted out her view of the room. Men moved in tactical formation to surround the house, men who wouldn’t be satisfied to stay outside for long.
She refocused on her surroundings and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The stairwell landing led to a hallway where more dead men lay scattered around the bottom of an attic ladder that had been pulled down. She ignored them and climbed up to poke her head into the small attic space.
Janet knelt beside a small body in the dark space, her hand gently stroking his cheek. The sight brought a lump to Heather’s throat.
“Robby?”
When Janet turned her head, she smiled.
“As long as we don’t move him anytime soon, he’ll live.”
“Thank God.”
“Where’s Mark?”
“He stayed downstairs to guard the back door. Jack wants us to make our stand here.”
“Given our situation, it’s as good a place as any.” Janet stood, hefting her assault rifle. “We’ll leave Robby right where he is and give his nanites time to finish their repairs. This place is like a mini-fortress. I’ll need you covering the back of the house from that crawl space. I’ll take the front.”
“Okay,” Heather said. “How’s your ammo holding out?”
“Down to five magazines. You?”
&
nbsp; “Four plus a few rounds. Mark’s pretty much the same. After that we’re down to pistols.”
Janet nodded. “When it comes to that, we can scrounge more nine millimeter off these dead guys.”
As Heather entered the crawl space that led to the rear window slot, she called back over her shoulder.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t.”
But the visions that played out in her mind did little to reassure her.
Distant fire tornados swirled into the glowing Lima sky. On the ground, the panicked populace screamed. Daniil embraced the otherworldly feeling of this night. The gun battle toward which he and the Spetsnaz were headed had just come to an abrupt end and it made him want to up the pace. Evidently Major Kamkin felt it too, because his men appeared to throw caution to the wind as they swept down out of the slum toward their target. They would not allow their quarry to slip away.
As they reached the end of the block, a side street led off toward a lone two-story house at the end of the cul-de-sac two blocks ahead. Even in the dim light from the fire-lit sky, there was no doubt that this was the one. The number of bodies lying in the street around the domicile proclaimed as much.
Kamkin gave another whistling signal and the dozen or so men nearest him slowed, moving into a spread tactical formation that took advantage of the houses along each side of the road for cover. The rest of the formation was spread wide down different streets and alleys so that they could encircle the house before they tightened the noose.
A lone gunshot split the night. Fifteen feet to Daniil’s left front, blood splashed from Galina Anikin’s head and she dropped as if she’d been struck with a hammer.
Daniil didn’t hesitate and neither did any of the nearby commandos, diving behind cover. Immediately, gunfire opened up from positions all along the street as the commandos returned fire. The problem was they had no idea precisely where in the house the shot had come from.
He glanced over at his lover’s body and felt ice replace the heat that had flowed through his veins. The sniper shot had been well aimed. The Ripper was in there, waiting for him. With a snarl curling his lips, Daniil moved forward in quick bursts, from cover to cover, just like the other commandos.
Fine. Daniil was coming. And when he reached his target, he planned on taking his sweet time with The Ripper’s wife and son.
Having let all the commandos pass him by, Jack looped back. The rear of the house, having already been penetrated, was the weak spot, although he sensed that the three most dangerous predators were on the front side. As he moved silently through the shadows, a lone gunshot rang out and he immediately recognized the sound of the 7.62mm SCAR-H. That meant Janet had just taken out her first target. And sure enough, one of the three alpha predators winked out in his mind.
He breathed a single thought her way. Good shooting, babe.
The sound of return fire brought a cold smile to Jack’s lips. She had their attention. Perfect.
Sliding through the deep brush along the north side of a shed, he moved slowly up behind his first target, a kneeling man, the stock of an RPG-7 balanced on his shoulder as he aimed it toward the back door. Jack’s dagger punched a hole in the back of his neck, just below the skull, severing the man’s spinal cord.
As the man crumpled silently to the ground, Jack plucked the rocket launcher from his hand, then knelt in his place. Just then a double blast from a shrill whistle split the night and all firing came to a sudden end. The commandos would no longer be wasting ammunition blind-firing at the house, and an assault was imminent.
A new round of whistles rang out and from the far side of the clearing another RPG fired. The door exploded, leaving a jagged hole in the stone wall in its place. A dozen commandos sprinted toward the back of the house, spreading out so that a sniper would have to take time adjusting her aim for each shot while dealing with a barrage of suppressive fire from the men who stayed behind.
Watching some of the commandos fall to sniper fire, Jack aimed the RPG and waited. As the survivors closed on the house, their angles of approach grouped them and Jack squeezed the trigger, sending the rocket-propelled grenade whooshing toward its new target.
Behind a wall at the top of the stairs, Mark sighted along his AR-15 and waited for the assault he expected to come. The leader of the charge would no doubt hurl a grenade inside, but unless Mark got very unlucky, this position would shield him from the blast. Then the others would pour through that hole, and Mark would make short work of them.
When his hearing picked up the distinctive sound of an RPG firing, Mark leaped backward, putting more wall between himself and an explosion that was much bigger than he’d planned for. The blast shook the house and sent a plume of masonry and dust billowing up the stairs after him. Pain flared in his left shoulder and he turned to see a piece of the balustrade jutting out just beneath his collarbone, having passed clear through his body.
He coughed and blinked to clear the blinding dust from his eyes. Upstairs he could hear Heather and Janet both firing.
“Shit!”
Another RPG blast followed, although this one appeared to have been misaimed, exploding outside the house. The screams of the wounded told him it might not have been such a miss after all. As he struggled back to his feet, hefting the AR-15 with one hand, he forced a grin. Jack was out there among their enemies . . . and he was hunting.
CHAPTER 28
Daniil recognized Kamkin’s plan of attack and thought it a good one. Unfortunately, something on the back side of the house had caused the timing to be off. Two rocket-propelled grenades were supposed to impact the rear door simultaneously. Instead, he’d heard only one, followed by the covering gunfire for the assault, followed by yet another RPG explosion.
Whether Major Kamkin recognized it or not, this meant that someone was outside their lines of containment and Daniil had a pretty damn good idea who it was. The Ripper. And if Daniil didn’t do something quickly, The Ripper would move along their line, taking out the Spetsnaz commandos one at a time from behind.
Daniil ducked low to the ground and moved to the major’s side.
“Kamkin, The Ripper’s outside your lines on the back side of the house.”
“Shit, man. Do you think I don’t know what I’m hearing?”
“You need to send a team to hunt him down, right now.”
“No, apparatchik. My mission is the Smythes. I’m going to breach this house through the front and kill the Smythes and everyone inside. If you want Gregory, you go get him.”
Daniil sputtered but before he could issue his furious response, Kamkin raised his whistle to his lips and blew another short series of blasts. This time, as should have happened in back, two RPGs ripped a hole in the wall where the front door used to be. Then, as he watched Kamkin’s men charge toward the opening under cover of gunfire from those left behind, a new opportunity occurred to him.
With The Ripper focused on killing the men assaulting the house, perhaps Daniil could turn his own strategy against him.
Janet felt the twin explosions from the area of the front door as a jolt lifted the crawlway floor and her prone body along with it. In the attic behind her, Robby groaned.
She’d practiced rapid-fire target shooting many times. Of the dozen commandos that raced from cover to the smoking hole below her, she dropped five of them. But seven got inside. The sound of Heather firing from the rear crawlway meant that more were making the rush from the back side of the house. A new fear crawled into Janet’s mind. Where was Mark? Had he been killed by the RPGs?
The sound of gunfire below answered her question. Mark was still fighting.
“I’m going down to help Mark,” Heather yelled from behind her.
“No. Mark can handle himself. I need you here covering the back of the house.”
Janet understood Heather’s worry for Mark, but if they didn’t want to be completely overwhelmed, they both needed to keep thinning the ranks of those who yet remained outside. The fact that Heather didn’t
argue meant her savant visions had just confirmed Janet’s decision.
Spotting a slight movement in the distance, she aimed and fired, sending another man sprawling to the ground. Shifting her aim one more time, a soft whisper escaped her lips.
“Don’t worry, Robby. I won’t let them have you. And neither will my Jack.”
The smoke and dust were so thick that even Mark’s enhanced vision was having a difficult time seeing the moving figures in the room below the stairs. Switching the selector on his assault rifle from semi to auto, he pointed the weapon around the corner, squeezed the trigger, and held it, spraying bullets back and forth across the room below.
When he heard the clank and rattle of a hand grenade landing near him, he dropped the AR-15, caught the grenade on the second bounce, and tossed it back where it came from. The explosion sent him tumbling back down the hall, where his impact with the floor drove the spike deeper into his upper shoulder.
The pain sent a white lance across his vision, but he shunted it aside, willing himself back into action. The muzzle of a weapon emerged through dust-filled darkness. Mark grabbed it with his right hand and twisted violently, feeling the hot barrel scorch his hand. He pulled the man who held it forward into a kick that caved in the commando’s chest and launched his dying body back down the stairs.
“Screw this!”
Having had enough of hiding behind walls and waiting for more grenades to land, Mark leaped into the smoke and confusion below. He shunted aside the pain in his shoulder and focused on one thought.
Close with and destroy the enemy.
Mark gasped in a deep breath and exploded into the nearest commando before the man could bring his weapon to bear. Mark’s gut punch lifted the soldier from the rubble-strewn floor and hurled him into the man behind him, sending both bodies crashing down.
Mark’s heightened senses made it seem as if the surrounding smoke, dust, darkness, and noise were nothing but distant distractions. Four men up and moving plus the two he’d just put down made six enemies.
The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) Page 33