Strike Force Charlie s-3

by Mack Maloney

  The noise came again. A mournful thumping now, followed by the tinkling of broken glass. This end of the hall was particularly dark and gloomy, and this was the first time she’d ventured this way since that night with Ryder. It would have been the perfect time for a flashlight. If only she owned one.

  She reached the bedroom door just in time to hear the noise once more. Thump … thump … followed by the sound of broken glass hitting the floor. Li steeled herself, then toed the door open.

  Blood on the window … that’s what she saw first. Smudges of it. Streaks of it. Splatter drops, everywhere. And two hands were reaching for her right through the jagged panes. And behind them the faces of two monsters, right out of hell, in muffled shrieks screaming at her to let them in.

  It took her a moment ….

  Then she realized what was going on ….

  It was Ozzi. And Hunn.

  And both were covered with blood.

  She dropped the gun and rushed to the window. The clasps on the sill were rusty and stuck. The two men were hanging off the small roof just outside. This was the back of the house, which was really the front, which meant they had climbed up here, to hide in the shadows, dying, while she was talking with Nash.

  She.saw their faces now through the dusty, bloody window, hands still reaching for her like a real-life horror movie. Finally she got the clasps to move and the window flew open. Ozzi fell through an instant later. He was as white as a ghost. He was also covered in blood — but Li could not see any wounds.

  He could barely speak. “Help him …” he was moaning. “Just help him ….”

  Li leaned out the window to find Hunn halfway propped up against the frame, his legs out from under him. He certainly was covered with blood, and on him she saw a wound. A bad one, right in his chest.

  Where she found the strength she would never know. But somehow she was able to grab onto Hunn and, with Ozzi pulling from behind, drag his huge hulk through the window. All three of them landed on the floor with a crash. Li quickly got to her feet, closed the window, and pulled the curtains tight.

  Then she turned her attention to Hunn.

  With his arms limp, eyes rolled back into his head, she was sure he was dead. And Ozzi, too, for that matter. All the blood had drained from his face. He was shaking, his eyes barely able to stay open. But then she realized it was Hunn’s blood smeared all over him, not his own.

  “What happened?” she was finally able to gasp.

  “He was shot,” Ozzi coughed. “Back in the city, while we were trying to get Rushton. He’s hurt real bad.”

  Li looked out the window to the side of the house. “But where’s the van?” she asked him as she started to tear away the top of Hunn’s combat suit.

  “It’s back in town,” Ozzi told her. “I couldn’t get to it. The cops were everywhere looking for us.”

  Li stopped everything she was doing for a moment. Something didn’t make sense here.

  “But how then …?” she began stammering. “How did you get him back here? It’s at least five miles, uphill ….”

  Ozzi just looked at her. He was on his knees; they were scraped to the bone. His face was dirty; tears were cutting through the grime. His fingernails were almost gone.

  “I carried him,” was all he said.

  Chapter 20

  Denver

  After the small war at the campground, after the ghosts had killed all four terrorists and destroyed the remaining missile and scattered pig parts everywhere, they climbed down the cliff to the tangled wreckage of the Sky Horse, 200 feet below.

  All four were crying as they lifted Gallant out of the pilot’s seat. His blood was splattered everywhere, his glasses shattered against the steering column. The rest of the copter was a total loss. All of the cell phones, all of Bates’s gadgets, their food, their water, their extra ammo — all of it gone. The only thing they found that was salvageable, strangely enough, was Finch’s Revolutionary War flag. It was seared and singed but otherwise unharmed. The team had two of the three big fifties with them, as well as their personal weapons and ammo, but only because this was the armament they’d jumped into the campsite with. It was painful for Fox and Puglisi to relight the fire that had flared up around the copter only to go out following the crash. But they couldn’t leave any evidence behind. So burn it they did.

  About a half-mile from the bottom of the cliff there was a wide drainage culvert, dug years ago to handle the spring runoff from the Rocky Mountains. This was where the team headed first Rows of trees and shrubbery lined both sides of the man-made waterway, which was all but dry now. The flora gave them cover from the state police helicopters that quickly appeared overhead.

  Once in the culvert, Puglisi went on ahead; there was a housing development a mile south of the crash site. It was the only place they could think to hide, at least until night fell. By the time Puglisi returned, local law enforcement and the FBI were swarming all over the remains of the chopper, or what was left of it anyway. It was a miracle the team wasn’t spotted in the ditch, just a few hundred feet away. Puglisi reported that he’d found a shed in the backyard of a house in the development very close to a bend in the culvert. No one seemed to be at home in this house at the moment. The trees were thick on both sides of the ditch all the way down, giving them cover they would need. The team quickly agreed they should try to make for the tiny garage.

  Ryder carried Gallant the entire way. He refused to let anyone help him. He had his reasons for this. It should have been him in the copter at the time the missile hit it, not Gallant — this Ryder told the others over and over. He’d been “on the ground” for the last hit before the campground, that being the attack on the terrorists’ boat off the water from Milwaukee, so it should have been his turn behind the controls.

  But Gallant had never really stuck to the one-two schedule, so when it was time to jump off for the campground attack, as in the past, he told Ryder to go. And Ryder went, but only because he actually liked skewering the mooks. He liked shooting them to pieces and stuffing their mouths with bacon. He liked them to see his face, to feel his pain, before he sent them off to hell. But now this was the result. Someone should have been lugging him at that moment, Ryder knew. That’s why he insisted on carrying Gallant on his own.

  They reached the housing development Puglisi had scoped out with no problems. The law enforcement people, most of them still visible up on the cliff, seemed intent on searching the high areas in and around the campground. The ghosts had to lay low a couple times during this scramble as the state police helicopters roared over. But, luckily for the ghosts, no one spotted them moving on the ground below.

  Climbing up the embankment at the bend in the culvert, Fox and Bates carefully cut an opening in the wooden fence at the back of the yard in question. They all managed to slip through this hole and gain entry to the shed, again without being spotted. Bates carefully replaced the wood taken from the fence, making it look as if nothing had been disturbed. Only when they were all inside the shed, among the lawn mowers and the snow shovels and the rakes, did they breathe easy, if just for a moment.

  All except Ryder, that is. He laid Gallant down as gently as possible, then collapsed to the floor. Bates gave him some water. Fox lit a cigarette for him. Ryder’s combat suit was drenched in blood not his own — it had all flowed out of Gallant. And Ryder’s face was grimy, too, and his hands were cut and bruised; his shoulders were at the point of dislocation.

  But he had done for Gallant what Ozzi had done for Hunn. He had carried his brother warrior away from the danger.

  The only difference: Gallant was dead.

  * * *

  Jack Rucker arrived home from the second shift at the Denver Flats munitions plant to find the door on his backyard shed unlocked and slightly ajar.

  He didn’t give it a second thought. Parking his car in the garage next to the shed, he was almost too exhausted to think. It had been a long day at work. He was nearly 70 years old. He’d serve
d as a security guard for the plant for almost 40 years. His shifts seemed to get harder to take every day.

  He entered his small two-story house by the side door, nearly being mauled by one of his wife’s cats eagerly waiting to be let out. Rucker walked quietly into his kitchen. It was past eleven o’clock and his wife had gone to bed long ago. She’d left him a dinner of meat loaf and French fries in the microwave. A note hanging from it instructed him to simply push the big red button.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and started his coffeepot. The plant had been incredibly busy tonight. Bombs — especially aerial bombs — were a hot commodity these days, and that’s what they did at Denver Flats. They made bombs. Rucker had been on the front gate since two that afternoon. Between the parade of government cars going in and trucks carrying bombs going out, it had been nonstop for nine hours.

  He clicked on the kitchen’s under-the-shelf TV, anticipating some Leno to go along with his meat loaf. But Leno wasn’t on. Instead the local news station was in the middle of a Special Report.

  It took Rucker a few moments to understand what was happening on the screen, this because when the picture first blinked on, it was showing a replay of the events of 9/11, specifically the second hijacked plane going into the second of the Twin Towers. For a moment, crazily, Rucker thought it had happened again.

  But then he realized the station was actually in the middle of a news wrap-up, waiting to go live at the bottom of the hour. They broke for a commercial. That’s when Rucker heard two sirens outside. They seemed to be coming from opposite directions; indeed, through his back door window he could see one police car approaching from one end of his quiet suburban street, with another roaring past it in the opposite direction.

  Dumb cops, he thought.

  He turned back to the TV. They were still in commercial break, and this was the only channel the crappy little kitchen set picked up. What was going on? Denver Flats was a national defense plant; the workers were not allowed to carry or listen to radios or watch TV while working. In effect, he’d been sealed off from the outside world for nearly half the day.

  Now something seemed to have happened right here in his little community.

  He fought the temptation to wake his wife and waited instead for the news to come back on. When it did, at first the news anchors missed their cue and were caught whispering to each other. Finally they snapped to. A graphic popped up in back of them. It showed an airliner going down in flames but also had a huge question mark superimposed on it.

  They began speaking ….

  Rucker sat there openmouthed, his meat loaf getting cold, as he heard for the first time of the events that had taken place up at Whispering Falls campground, not two miles north of him. The missile launch. The dead terrorists. The crashed helicopter. The government’s admission — finally — that a kind of rogue antiterrorist group was roaming the country. Various FBI spokesmen were interviewed, urging citizens to be on the lookout for this rogue team, as if they were somehow just as great a threat (if not more so) as the terrorists, who, it was not mentioned in more than passing, might have tried to shoot down as many as five airliners in the past week.

  The local news reporter came back on and said, “When asked why it seemed this rogue unit knew more about the terrorists’ intentions than the FBI itself, a Bureau spokesman responded simply, ‘No Comment ….’”

  Back to the anchor: “And earlier today, the Governor’s office authorized a request from Washington that the Colorado National Guard join in the search.”

  At that moment, on cue, Rucker heard a rumbling noise outside. He returned to the side window to see a column of military trucks heading in his direction. The image startled him. His quiet street, lit only by the bare street lamps, in what was supposed to be the dead of night — and now three big troop trucks followed by two Humvees, were piercing the darkness. It was the National Guard, looking for the rogue squad.

  He returned to the kitchen and picked at his semiwarm meat loaf. But he wasn’t hungry anymore. These events disturbed him. He still had memories of life during World War II and Korea, and certainly Vietnam and the first Gulf War. But things had changed so much since then. Terrorists running wild in the country. Rogue hit squads doing the job that the government should be doing. Where was it all going to end?

  He wasn’t sure why, but at that moment he looked out his back window. The shed door, unlocked and opened a bit when he first came home, was now shut tight. That was strange ….

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, then went out the side door and into his backyard. Over the wooden stockade fence and across his neighbors’ lawn he could see the National Guard trucks driving along the next street over. They had large searchlights turned on now and were directing these bright beams into people’s backyards, into their cars, even splashing them all over the homes themselves. Again, this image of the military at night startled him. This just didn’t seem like the America he knew.

  He walked to the rear of his property — and was surprised again. The shed door was slightly ajar once more. The hinges? he thought. Were they getting too old? He usually locked the shed when not using it, if just to keep the raccoons out. And there was no way his wife ever came out here to open it up.

  In any case, he was intent on closing his shed door now. A gust of wind might yank the damn thing off, and it would be expensive to replace. One step away from the dark opening, though, he found his feet frozen to the ground. What was wrong? He tried to take another step but couldn’t. Helpless, he stared into the shed — and was startled to see a pair of eyes staring back out at him.

  It was due to a premonition that he did not step into the shed, and it was a good thing, too. Because the next thing he saw was the barrel of a very large gun pointing right at his chest with a bayonet attached to it by nothing more than a dozen or so large rubber bands.

  Just then, he heard the National Guard trucks turn the corner next street over. They were heading back in his direction. Suddenly all the backyards on his block were filled with the harsh searchlights. Rucker thought he was dreaming. This didn’t seem real.

  He looked deep into the eyes of the person holding the rifle on him and realized now there was more than one person in his shed. And more than one gun pointing out at him. He was still immobile; he was barely breathing. But his mind was clear and in that moment he knew that these people were the rogue team the government was looking for.

  Rucker had served in the armed forces during the mid-50s. He voted Republican and considered himself a loyal American. But at that moment, he did something that surprised even him.

  Just a half-second before the National Guard truck’s searchlight swept through his backyard, he closed the shed door tight, shielding the people inside.

  * * *

  June Rucker woke up to the sound of someone whispering in her ear.

  When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was a great wash of light pouring in her bedroom window.

  “It’s OK,” she heard the voice whisper again. In the weird shadows cast by the light she saw her husband bending over her. “It will be all right,” he was saying to her. “It’s OK ….”

  She looked up at him. She’d never seen him look like this before.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Is the house on fire?”

  He almost laughed. “No, my dear,” he replied. “Something has happened. Were you watching the TV at all tonight?”

  “Yes — the news. About the terrorists. And these helicopter people or something ….”

  “Put your robe on and come down to the kitchen then,” he told her. “There’s something you’ve got to see.”

  Thirty seconds later, June was standing in her kitchen. Four very strange people were there, staring back at her.

  They were dressed like soldiers who’d lost their way home. They were bearded, grungy, dirty. One was covered with blood.

  June Rucker didn’t need any explanation but knew exactly who these people were.
r />   “The people from the helicopter? The ones the government is looking for?”

  They all nodded. Jack was standing right next to her. They looked like Ma and Pa Kettle together. He nodded, too.

  At that moment, the searchlight swept through their yard again. The fugitives all flinched.

  “The whole world is looking for them,” Jack said to her, this as June noticed all the weapons the men were carrying.

  “I don’t think you’ve exactly captured them, dear,” she deadpanned.

  “I haven’t,” he replied. “Nor do I want to.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “I think we should help them,” he said.

  June stood there for a long moment; it seemed like a part of her life was flashing before her eyes.

  Then she said, “I think we should help them, too.”

  * * *

  They dug Gallant’s grave in shifts.

  Fox and Puglisi went out first to carve a hole at the edge of the property, next to the shed, ducking down whenever the searchlights went over. Then Ryder and Bates, Gallant’s close colleagues since the beginnings of the team, carried him out and put him in the ground, covering him over and replacing the dug-up strips of grass to hide the spot. There were no prayers. No last words. The constant threat of searchlights prevented any of that.

  June Rucker was a retired visiting nurse. She patched their wounds and made them all take some Tylenol. Jack Rucker made them a hot meal. Eggs, ham, and pancakes galore. They took turns using the shower and June taught them how to use her washing machine. While all this was going on, the police and National Guard continued sweeping through the neighborhood but only with their searchlights and not yet door-to-door. The team kept their eyes on the Rucker’s living room TV, too, switching between CNN, Fox, and the local all-night news. It was nonstop reportage, but they wound up hearing the same headline over and over again: a terrorist attempt to shoot down a 747 had been foiled, four terrorists had been killed, and authorities were searching the local area for “others connected with the incident”