by A. J Tata
Then Ameri was in her mind, saying, Go now.
Alex stood slowly, her knees popping like firecrackers. Other than the aching bones, she was stealthy. Two days ago, Alex had unlatched the door that led to the master closet so that she could silently push it inward and brush past his Army uniforms.
Leaving behind her detritus of food wrappers and water bottles, she moved slowly, one foot in front of the other along the dirt floor of the tunnel. Reaching the end of the narrow passageway, she felt for the metal ladder rung and found it. Grasping the third rung, she placed a foot on the first one and began to climb. She was stealthy, moving like a cat tiptoeing through the night, stalking.
The ladder was bolted to the frame of the house and was straight up. It had been built as an escape route for Savage to get into the tunnel and the COOP. Reaching the master bedroom closet panel, she shoved on it slightly and felt it give noiselessly. She had put Vaseline on the hinges the same day that she had prepared the hatch for her entry.
She stepped through the entry, totally focused now. She was within yards of her destination. Her big decisions now were, Shoot him or stab him?
Both, Ameri told her. Enjoy the close kill. Look into his eyes. Slide the knife into his heart. Then put the pistol to his head and a bullet through his brain.
There he was, a lump on the bed. She recognized the soft snore she had slept next to after sex. Savage was a good lover but was quick to sleep once they were done. He wasn’t one for cuddling or holding. He was a hard man who lived a Spartan life of killing the enemies of the nation. She admired him for that. But he also made a bad mistake in killing her sister, Fatima.
For that he would pay.
Alex stood over the bed holding a knife, not unlike she had the time the doctor had awoken and talked her down out of her fugue state. This time, though, she would not be talked down. Ameri was in control. She held the knife in her dominant right hand and the pistol in her left. She studied the rhythmic breathing of Savage’s back. He was sound asleep with his head buried in the pillow. She found the spot on Savage where she wanted to slide the knife.
She leaned forward and placed the knife against his back, its razor-sharp tip easily cutting through the fabric.
* * *
Jake Mahegan sensed Alex’s presence as she climbed the ladder and opened the emergency door that Alex had built into the compound once the COOP was completed. Savage had been unaware, because he was often deployed for months at a time, but Owens had sent a microdrone inside the COOP not too long ago that used infrared and thermal imaging to map the interior. Increasingly, special mission units were using these drones to measure dimensions of walls and view the interior of buildings before assaulting.
Owens had found that the imaging showed a thin false wall where previously there had been nothing but dirt all around the COOP. Owens had inspected, found the tunnel, and reported it to O’Malley and Mahegan. Always suspicious of their enigmatic former boss, Mahegan, O’Malley, and Owens kept the information to themselves, assuming Savage had built the passageway. When Mahegan had mentioned the passageway to Savage, the general had expressed ignorance. That was when Mahegan knew where Alex Russell was hiding. They had found the dead soldier’s Jeep Wrangler hidden in a creek bed beneath some freshly broken pine saplings less than a mile from Savage’s estate.
Mahegan lay perfectly still, breathing steadily, even adding a faux snore into his exhale. Cuffed along his left wrist was his Blackhawk knife, blade locked open, and his trusty Sig Sauer Tribal was in his right hand.
He felt the tip of the knife against his back. It wouldn’t take Alex Russell long to realize the knife was pressing against a ceramic body armor plate.
He felt the knife searching for an opening as if she thought she was simply pushing against a bone. Mahegan used his left arm to impose a powerful thrust over the sheets and into Alex Russell’s left arm. He was thrusting blind but was happy that the first cut had found solid purchase on her body. He quickly slid his right leg underneath his body and spun so that he was able to slide out of the bed on the side where she was.
She was prepared, though, and slashed the knife across his chest, its blade flashing in the sparks created by the metal on ceramic high-velocity contact. They squared off like two wrestlers in a ring. There was maybe fifteen feet of room in either direction between the west wall of the house and the bed and in between the south wall and the master closet. Mahegan had worn the body armor at the insistence of Owens and O’Malley.
“What if she comes out of the closet spraying and praying, dude?” Owens had asked.
“Just make sure you guys stay out of sight and out of audible range until she makes her move,” Mahegan had said.
“Why not just drop some smoke grenades down there and flush her out?” O’Malley advised.
“This is personal now. Plus, there may be more ways out of there that we don’t know about,” Mahegan said.
“I don’t know, man, I checked that thing out pretty good, but it’s a possibility.”
“Still, we could block both ends of the tunnel,” Owens said.
“Do we know she’s in the tunnel? For sure? We do that and she’s watching somehow, maybe with her own drone, then we lose her. This is what she wants. She blames Savage for killing Fatima. This is the bait to flush her out. We go in there and she’s there, it’s a booby trap or death trap for us. We go in there and she’s not there, she’s in the wind. She’s either in the tunnel or in a spider hole somewhere waiting for Savage.”
So Mahegan had driven Savage’s Ford F150 pickup truck into the garage and parked it next to his Jeep Cherokee. He had entered through the door, dropped the keys in the tray, and made his way upstairs, trying to take forty pounds off his footfalls to match Savage’s weight. He had removed his boots, which he didn’t want to do, but also thought that Alex might be able to see the shape of his Doc Martens through the outline of the bedspread and sheet. Not wanting to fight in socks, he had removed them and was now barefoot, which was second best to having a good pair of boots to kick in Alex’s head.
He watched Alex circle and saw in her eyes that she had gone completely crazy. She was mumbling something to herself that sounded like run, no kill him, run, no kill him, where’s Savage, no kill him. Her hair was stringy and lifting into the air as if static electricity was pulling it upward. She wore the same clothes she had been wearing—the dark cargo pants, black top, and tan outer tactical vest. Her arm was bleeding from the knife wound he had inflicted, but she seemed unbothered by the pain. She smelled like urine and body odor, perhaps from days of living in the tunnel.
“What did you see, Mahegan?” she asked him. Her voice was eerily an octave higher, as if it were a different person speaking. She was a woman possessed. People who were operating disconnected from reality, perhaps high on something, or in this case dominated by intense hatred, were people that had no fear and felt no pain.
She lunged with the knife and grazed his left shoulder. He used her momentum to throw her up against the wall. She still clutched the pistol in her left hand. When Alex’s back hit the wall, she bounced off it like a pro wrestler bounces off the ropes. She came at him hard, head first, wild eyes looking upward, showing the whites beneath her irises. She was fast and quick, slashing left and right as if she was flipping nunchucks. Mahegan sidestepped but still caught the butt of her pistol against his injured left shoulder, which screamed at him with pain.
Mahegan’s back was to the wall, and Alex was coming at him again from the direction of the bed.
She stopped short, lifted the pistol, and fired.
Alex was a smart fighter. She had demonstrated her skills on the ridge as well as when she was hiding in plain sight daily. Savage had given him her background in martial arts, but even he was surprised at her quickness. She had charged him twice to get him to believe she would charge a third time, and he did, but that was when she leveled the pistol at his face from ten feet away and pulled the trigger.
The b
ullet slapped into the wall behind him. Her aim was marginally off as it had been on the cliff. Mahegan raised his Tribal and snapped off two quick rounds, both impacting the center mass of her body.
Blood began to blossom on her tactical vest.
He watched her fall to her knees. She attempted to lift her weapon, but couldn’t. Reaching into her tactical vest, she removed a hand grenade and placed it to her teeth to pull the pin.
Mahegan shot her in the head, but not before the pin stayed between her clenched teeth and the grenade bounced to the floor. Mahegan dove toward the grenade, palmed it, and hurled it toward the window. If it went through, he might live. If he missed, he would die.
The tinkle of broken glass was followed immediately by a loud explosion.
Alex Russell was moving toward him with the knife, like an ice climber. He had only grazed her scalp, but the body shot had done its damage. She reached out, stabbed the knife into the hardwood floors, and pulled herself forward. Repeated the process.
Mahegan stood, kicked the knife away, and said, “Alex, I’m sorry about Fatima. She died next to the man she loved. What more can you ask for? You? You get to die alone on the floor of the man you loved.”
Alex/Ameri stared at Mahegan. Her eyes focused on him, flashing with hatred before they went blank with death.
He walked out of Savage’s bedroom, his clothes bloody and his conscience clean.
EPILOGUE
MAHEGAN LOOKED AT CASSIE FROM ACROSS THE ROOM, THEN stared back into the ocean. He stood at a floor-to-ceiling open window that led to a balcony. Curtains fluttered inward with the trades whisking off the Atlantic Ocean. It was early October and the nightmare of Alex Russell was a good two weeks behind them. Mahegan had attended the funerals for General and Mrs. Bagwell and had been by Cassie’s side the entire time.
After leaving Arlington Cemetery, it had been Cassie’s idea to get away to Bald Head Island at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. No cars were allowed on the island, and they had to take a ferry over from Southport.
“Less chance of General Savage finding you and giving you another mission,” Cassie had said as she presented the idea to Mahegan. “And I’d like to spend some down time with you.”
Mahegan pulled the salty air into his lungs. He had grown up in the Outer Banks, breathing sea mist since he was a baby. He thought about Patch, Sean, and General Savage. He had saved his teammates. Cassie had helped and at the same time lost her parents. That counted for something, maybe a lot.
He had wrestled with the undeniable pull of attraction toward Cassie during the mission and after but had kept that feeling at bay, like a winter frost extending into spring. Mahegan had not been lucky in love, as they say. He’d lost everyone he’d chosen to be close to or he had received missions on the heels of making a decent connection.
But here he was with Cassie, who was lying naked in their bed in a rented cottage on Bald Head Island. She rolled over and stared at him in his boxer shorts.
“You’re looking pretty good standing there all semi-naked and stuff,” Cassie said.
Mahegan smiled. “Feeling pretty good.”
He looked at her left shoulder and saw the Ranger black-and-gold half-moon shaped tattoo.
“Whacha thinking about?” Cassie asked. She rolled partially, still nursing her left arm.
“Not much. Mostly my mom. She’s gone, but I think about her every day. I think about what she taught me and how she always told me it was better to die an honorable death than to grow old.”
Cassie paused, looked beyond him at the ocean, and then caught his eyes. “I’d kind of like to do both.”
Mahegan smiled again and thought for the first time since he was fourteen years old that he might like that, too. He walked over to the bed, lowered himself carefully next to Cassie, and pulled her onto his chest.
“Me too,” he said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, thanks to the great team at Kensington Books: my editor, Gary Goldstein, communications director, Vida Engstrand, publicist, Karen Auerbach, publisher, Lynn Cully, and president Steven Zacharius. They all worked hard to make Besieged a better book and I’m grateful for this team every day.
Likewise, Scott Miller and the team at Trident Media Group continue to prove they are the best in the business. Thanks to Allisyn Shindle, Emily Ross, and Brianna Weber for the way you all crush it every day on behalf of all of Trident’s authors.
A special thank you to Richard Wilkins and Beverly Setz, who won the Wilmington, NC character name auction for charity. The substantial proceeds went to Songs From the Sky, a nonprofit documentary film about the 82nd Airborne Division Chorus produced by legendary filmmaker Paula Haller. Beverly Setz did a great job as the Blackhawk pilot ferrying Tommy Oxendine around North Carolina.
Another special thank you goes to Cheryl and Chuck “Q” McQueary, who donated generously to the NC Heroes Fund in the Raleigh, NC charity auction. The funds support our active duty service men and women through the NC Heroes Fund. Chuck McQueary made for a tough SWAT team leader, his moral compass keeping Oxendine in check.
Thanks to Rick French of French/West/Vaughn, the national powerhouse in public relations. A huge shout out to Charles Upchurch, who provided man-to-man coverage 24/7 through some crazy news cycles as we launched Three Minutes to Midnight paperback, Besieged hardcover, and prepped for Direct Fire.
As always, research continues to be a favorite aspect of my writing and I hope you enjoyed the story. I look forward to delivering the next Jake Mahegan novel to you.
—AJT