Creeping, sweating, and trembling, he went to the front doors. They were glass, but nothing could be seen because of the blackout curtains. “Definitely not deserted,” he whispered.
His own words reminded him of the absolute need for silence, so he took out the radio and didn’t just turn it off, he placed it in the shadows next to the building. Now, if he was caught, he could claim to be acting alone. They probably wouldn’t believe him and they would possibly torture him, but he’d hold out long enough for Jillybean to get away.
There was nothing left but to enter the building. Fear made him pause on the front steps and stark terror turned the pause into a hesitation that was on the verge of becoming a faltering.
“Shit,” he whispered and went through the doors, pushing past the blackout curtains. He found himself in a candle-lit lobby that had been repurposed into a cubicled set of offices with a manned desk at the very front.
The man behind the desk: tall, slim, dressed in BDUs and with a natural military air blinked in surprise as Neil raised both weapons.
“Yes?” he asked. “May I help you?”
“Where are your prisoners? Six soldiers and a girl of about eighteen. Where are they?”
The bewilderment in the man’s eyes finally left to be replaced by a sharp look. “They’re gone. They were sent down river two days ago.”
The reply smote Neil hard. A wave of anguish almost overcame him, but then suspicion set in. “Let me see your cells. Come on, get up. And go slow or I swear I’ll splatter your brains all over the place.” He had both weapons pointed at the man’s head.
With his hands up, the soldier got to his feet and then led the way around the cubicles, through another set of offices and to a heavy steel door that was wedged open. The cells were past the door and they were undoubtedly empty.
Now, anguish really did sweep Neil. He had been too late. They had been sent downriver and that meant they had been sent to the River King. It was hard to believe, but the River King was even more of an evil beast than the Colonel was.
Neil’s fear for his best friend and for his daughter was heavy on him and he was slow to perceive the danger as the soldier spun so fast that he was a blur.
Chapter 31
Neil Martin
The guard moved so fast that before he knew it, Neil found his gun-hand thrust upwards so the barrel was pointed at the ceiling and at the same time, the man was reaching for the taser with his other hand. Instinctively, Neil pulled the trigger.
The twin tasers shot out and struck the man directly in the forehead, discharging 2,000 volts of electricity. What happened next was haunting. The guard fell to ground in some sort of hyper-epileptic fit, his muscles curling his arms into unnatural positions, like two caterpillars tossed onto a frying pan. His legs shot straight out stiff as boards, his heels thudding onto the tile in a disgusting drumroll. His eyes rolled back in his head so that only the whites showed and his teeth were locked so tightly together that Neil was sure they were going to crack and shoot out of his mouth.
“Oh, God,” Neil whispered and tried to pull the tasers out of the man’s head without touching the wires, but they stretched and stretched. Neil was halfway across the other room by the time they came out and by then the man was no longer being shocked. He laid on the floor, drooling, his muscles twitching, his eyes going in two different directions.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Neil said coming back to stand over him. “It was an accident. I never would have…” He stopped as he saw urine flowing from beneath the man. The apology wasn’t being heard.
Completely clueless how to help the man, sickened by what he had done and afraid of the consequences of getting caught, Neil turned and headed for the door, the long wires trailing behind. He didn’t know how to detach them and he wasn’t about to touch them, fearful of any residual juice left in the little boxy gun. They snapped off unexpectedly when he was twenty feet out the front door, which had shut on the barbed points.
He almost didn’t run back for them, but he felt there was a chance that he had accidentally fried the guard’s brains enough that he might not even remember that Neil had been there—if he recovered that is.
With the wires detached, Neil’s fear of them disappeared and as he hurried away from the MP station, he tried to wind them up and stuff them into his pocket. It was like trying to stuff live snakes into a bag and he was so involved with the process that he didn’t see another guard standing in the dark leaning on a tree, until he was right on top of him.
“What are you doing out so late?” the man asked causing Neil to jump and squeak in fright.
“Me? I—I was just. I was just…” He couldn’t come up with a lie. His brain felt as scrambled as the man he had just left. His first coherent thought was more of an internal aggravated whine: Why hadn’t Jillybean warned me this guy was right there? His next thought was: I left the radio back in the bushes!
The soldier went on: “Curfew is long gone and you had better have a good… what’s that on your face?”
“My face?” Neil had forgotten about the war paint. He had begun making nonsensical “Uh, uh, uh,” sounds when the light from the soldier’s under-barrel flashlight blinded him a second later.
A real fighter might have pulled his gun, but Neil still had his useless taser in his right hand, while his left hand was frozen half-in and half-out of a pocket filled with wire.
“What the fuck?” the soldier cried. “Who are you? And drop that…that gun or whatever it is.”
Neil was caught, dead to rights, and there was nothing he could do. The taser fell to the ground and was kicked away and then he was shoved against the same tree the soldier had been leaning against and then searched.
The grenade and the Beretta were discovered. When the cuffs were found next, the soldier slapped them on Neil’s wrists and then turned him around. “A grenade and a gun? Tell me what you were doing here, or so help me.” He shoved the bore of the M4 into Neil’s face, pushing it hard against his cheek.
“Uh, stealing,” he answered, thinking on the fly. “I was uh, hoping to get some stuff. You know like cool bombs or something.” His one hope was that he could stall long enough for Jillybean to rescue him. He looked past the soldier out into the night as he said: “Everyone says the Colonel has the coolest gadgets. Is that true?”
“I’m not going to tell you jack shit. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Actually, Neil didn’t think he could be all that smart. He was pulling guard duty in the middle of the night. Those slots weren’t likely given to the best and the brightest. Neil just had to keep the guy occupied. How long would it take Jillybean to climb down from the four-story building and then scamper two-hundred yards down the street? Five minutes? Six? So far it had been barely one minute.
“No sir. I don’t think you’re stupid at all. Not at all. I just, uh, figured that you were up there like a captain or a major and might know a lot more than just a dumb schmuck like me. The stories we hear about you soldiers here on the island, well, they are, uh, something else. Adventures and fighting and, uh, stuff. And the women. We hear you have tons of women.”
The soldier wore a screwed-up expression. “What are you talking about? There aren’t a ton of women here. And shut up, I gotta think.” He was quiet for at least half a minute before saying: “Sergeant Martinez will know what to do with you. I was supposed to call him anyways.”
He produced his own radio. “Charlie one this is Charlie six, over.” He waited a few seconds and then repeated: “Charlie one this is Charlie six, over.”
As they waited on a response, Neil grew tense, his eyes darting out into the night. How close was Jillybean to showing up, pistol in one hand, a taser in the other? It had to have been at least three minutes since Neil was captured. I just need two more minutes, he thought.
Charlie six wasn’t going to give it to him. “Something’s wrong,” he said, turning from Neil and shining his flashlight out into the night. The light made the shad
ows darker than before, which seemed to unnerve the soldier.
He grabbed, Neil’s arm and started pulling him back the way Neil had come. A third time he tried to raise Charlie One and when that didn’t work he grew panicky. “This is Charlie Six, is anyone out there?”
“Get off the net, Six, shit.”
“Who is that? Dinkins is that you? I caught an intruder but Charlie One isn’t responding. There may be something up.”
A new voice broke in: “He’s probably taking a dump.”
The first voice: “Shut up, Roy. Charlie Six, take him up to the big house. I’ll go check on Charlie One. Everyone else stay extra alert. If anyone else gets on the island, the Colonel will have our asses strung up in the trees.”
Extra alert, Neil didn’t like the sound of that. Had it been four minutes, or was time just seeming to fly by. “I’m all alone. Here, check my other pockets. You’ll see…”
“Shut up.” Neil was yanked along by the soldier, who kept his gun trained outwards swiveling it towards any sound or overly suspicious shadow. They walked past the MP station and fifty yards further on, they were on the less built up side of the island. On their left was the third hole of the golf course and on their right were strange insect like hunks of metal arranged in a great semi-circle.
In the dark it was hard to tell what they were until Neil saw a sign that said Artillery Park. “How pleasant,” he said to his captor. When he didn’t receive a response, Neil fell saying: “Ow! My ankle,” in a bad bit of acting.
The soldier knelt down, not next to Neil, but on his back. Neil could only breathe in tiny sips as again, the man pointed his rifle outward as if expecting the rescue that Neil was hoping for.
“Can’t breathe,” Neil said. The knee crushed down harder and now even sipping air was out of the question and the night grew blooming black clouds that pulsed along with his heartbeat.
The radio saved Neil from blacking out. “Charlie 6, this is Charlie Two, over.”
The knee had to be shifted for the man to get to his radio. “This is Charlie Six, any word from Charlie One?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. He wasn’t at the desk. I found him upstairs getting dressed and acting like he was drunk, but I didn’t smell anything on him. He said he must have fallen and messed himself up, but I don’t know about that. I’m going to have to wake up Captain Cornell, and he’s going to be pissed.”
“I wouldn’t worry, we’ll probably get medals. Six, out.” He put the radio away and pulled Neil to his feet. “I’m going to get a medal, at least. They’ll probably string you up by your thumbs. Come on.”
“My thumbs?”
“Yeah, it’s not pretty.”
Neil was half-dragged to a stately home that sat at the edge of the golf course. Its windows were blackened but there was a curl of smoke rising from the chimney, making the stars blink in and out. They went up the porch stairs and Charlie Six knocked lightly on the door.
It was opened a moment later, but not by the Colonel. Another soldier stood at the gap. He didn’t speak. “Private Blazek, sir. I was on security patrol and I caught someone sneaking around. He’s not from the base. And there might have been another incident at the station. Captain Cornell is being called in, just in case we need to go to full alert.”
As the eyes of the soldier in the house started to narrow, Charlie Six added: “They told me to come straight here, just in case there were more of them. We thought the Colonel would want to know right away.”
The soldier thought it over for a moment and then said: “Take the magazine out of your weapon and clear it.” The door was opened as Blazek made his weapon safe. He did the same thing with Neil’s Beretta and then handed the grenade over before stepping into a beautifully decorated foyer.
The soldier, who sported a name tag that read: Haigh, took the grenade and the weapons into another room. When he came back, he was accompanied by yet another soldier. They looked at Neil as though he were some sort of new breed of asshole that wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the old version.
“We should wake the Colonel,” Haigh said. “If there are more of ‘em, he’ll be pissed if we hadn’t.”
“I’m by myself, really,” Neil said. “There’s no need to wake him. It’s late, after all. And it’s not like I’m going anywhere.” He held up the cuffs and although they twinkled in the light of a few lanterns, all Neil could see were his thumbs.
If they strung him up, how long would he be able to hold out before he told them everything they wanted to know, including where Jillybean was? Would he last ten minutes? Would he last even two?
“It’s good that you like to talk,” Haigh said to Neil. “Because you’ll be talking a lot here pretty soon.” He left them and was gone for a surprisingly long time given the situation. Or at least it felt like a long time to Neil, who sweated and shook, and couldn’t seem to think of anything except getting strung up by his thumbs. Did they use piano wire for that sort of thing?
When he finally heard the Colonel’s boots heading down the stairs, Neil was so light-headed with fear that he thought he would faint. The Colonel looked the same to Neil: tall, with sandy blonde hair, and a cruel twist to his lips.
“Get the paint off him. Let’s see who we’re dealing with.” Haigh used a rag, not to wipe the camo off of Neil’s face, but to smash it off. He ground the rag into Neil’s flesh, causing him to fall over. Haigh followed him to the ground and kept going until Neil only had green at the edges. He was red everywhere else from the friction.
The Colonel looked down at Neil and failed to recognize him. It had to be all of the scars, Neil thought.
“Who are you and what are you doing on my island. And where are your friends?”
“I came alone,” Neil lied.
“He’s not alone,” the Colonel said. He looked evenly at Neil for a good minute before he turned to Private Blazek. “Find them. Wake up both MP companies. Tell Captain Cornell to secure the perimeter and then go building by building from one end of the island to the other. Flush them out and if you can, try to take them alive. I want to make an example of them.”
The soldier snapped off a salute, rushed to get his weapon and was trying to get the magazine in place and leave the house at the same time only to be confronted by Jillybean as he opened the door.
The little girl with the pink jacket and the white hat with its pom-pom sitting gaudily on top stood in the doorway with an aimed pistol in one hand and a live unpinned grenade in the other.
“Don’t move or I will shoot you.” She was absolutely stone cold. There wasn’t a twitch in her. For emphasis she cocked the gun. “Drop the weapon and step back.” Her .38 never budged and the look in her eyes was altogether ice.
Blazek stepped back fumbling both the weapon and the magazine so that they thudded to the floor. At the distraction Haigh reached for his holstered pistol quick as lightning, but Jillybean was faster. The gun was pointed at him in a blink.
Slowly, she raised the grenade and with a deadly smile on her impish face, said: “I really, really wouldn’t if I were you. I’ve killed lots of bigger guys than you, and that’s what means I could kill you if I wanted. And I kinda want to. You’re a bad guy and everyone knows it’s ok to kill bad guys.”
She moved into the room, shifting the balance of power, and Neil didn’t know whether to cry in joy over his imminent rescue or in sadness over what he was, once again, forcing the little girl to do…and to become. She would kill these idiots if she had to. She would gun them down without blinking.
And what would that do to her? How many dead bodies could she leave in her wake before she broke, once more? How many bodies would it take to permanently fix the idea within her that that she was a killer and that it was right and good for her to kill?
Chapter 32
Jillybean
From her perch, high on the four-story building, she had seen the guard lurking in the dark and she had keyed the talk button on the radio, just a tap. Then she had keyed it again
and again, in growing fear, until Neil came blundering around the corner.
“Stop,” she whispered into the radio. “Neil, stop. Stop! Neil!” He didn’t stop and he’d been captured and, just like that, her fear turned to frustration. Nothing was going right, starting with the fact he had come out of the MP station alone and now he was captured as well.
“Son of a…”
Jillybean! Ipes snapped. You do not say bad words, ever.
A few minutes earlier, the zebra had finally been freed from his triple ziplock bag imprisonment and, after making a great deal of noise gasping for breath and saying: Finally, finally I can breathe, over and over again, he had climbed up on her pack. She had asked if he wanted a turn on the scope, but he said he had the eyes of an owl and didn’t need a scope and that he was fine guarding the backpack.
“And what are you guarding it from?” she had asked.
Mice, duh. We have valuable items of a yummy nature in here. The cookies alone are worth millions.
She had grinned at that then, but now she glowered at him. “I was going to say: son of a gun and that’s not bad at all. But you know what? I am mad enough to say bad words. What’s wrong with Mister Neil? Is he blind? Is he deaf?”
Don’t be too hard on him. Very few people are cut out for this sort of operation. Only spies and top military guys are allowed to do covert ops and that’s for a reason. Normal people lose their heads or make mistakes.
“Yeah, and now I gotta fix them,” Jillybean griped.
How? We’ll never get down there in time, especially with you just sitting here, complaining.
“I’m sitting here because I can’t get down there in time. From here, I can see everything, or most of everything. All the important stuff, at least like where they’ll be going.”
As Neil was handcuffed by Private Blazek and then led away, Jillybean scoped the island as far as she could see, noting the things that would hurt her and those that would help her, and she had a simple plan worked out in no time. Preparing for it took only minutes and she was basically done by the time Neil was brought to the first stately house on the edge of the golf course.
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