by David Archer
“Actually, I didn’t think it was that big a risk. If I’d made it back without being seen, I would have simply followed the mission outline and done what I was sent for, but the moment I was caught, I had to rethink the whole thing. I know the rest of my team won’t shy away, so that meant I might have a small chance of rescue if I could get myself close to you. It worked.”
Dale’s eyes bounced from Noah’s face to the floor and back. “Look, if it comes down to it,” he said quietly, “get the women out. Leave me behind if you have to, or kill me, if it helps you to save them, all right?”
“I’m not planning to leave any of you behind,” Noah replied, “not if I can avoid it. You need to tell Langley what you know about the mole, and I need to see that Soo Mi doesn’t get to betray anyone else.”
Dale looked up sharply. “You know Soo Mi?” he asked. “Damn, man, that’s probably how you got caught!”
Noah nodded. “That’s a possibility I’ve been considering,” he said. “The guards who caught me came out looking for something, so it’s possible they were tipped off. And if Soo Mi is aware of the Chinese interest in Camelot, it’s even more likely, and I’ll let you read between the lines on that.”
Dale glanced over at the women who were still seated, then motioned for Noah to follow him to the far side of the room. They kept their backs turned, and Dale lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Do you really think there’s a chance you can get us out of here alive?”
Noah looked him in the eye. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “If it looks like we can’t get out of here together, I’m not going to let you be retaken. My team will come sometime between now and morning, and if I can help them from the inside then there’s a chance we can take this place down and then get you out of here. Can any of you fight?”
“We all had basic hand-to-hand training, and we can all handle a gun if you can get any.”
Nodding, Noah said, “All right. The next question is how do we get the guards outside the door to come in here?”
“They won’t,” Dale said. “Somebody will bring us breakfast in the morning, but those two always stand back and keep their guns aimed at the doorway. Their job is to keep us in here, and I guess they take it pretty seriously.”
“Their job isn’t to keep you in, it’s to make sure Song doesn’t lose you, and there’s a difference. What we need to do is make them think they failed.”
Dale looked confused. “And how do you plan to do that?”
“Where’s that can lid you used as a cutter?”
ELEVEN
“He’s coming back,” Marco whispered. Beside him, Randy nodded as they watched Noah come back around the corner of the building. He was moving swiftly and staying low, making his way back to the point that was closest to the little stand of trees.
A thin vertical line of light appeared suddenly, and instantly swelled into a rectangle as one of the doors on the back of the building swung open. Noah was less than twenty feet away when two soldiers stepped out, and one of them spotted him instantly. The muzzle of his gun snapped up instantly to center itself on his face, and the other one matched it a second later.
“Oh, shit,” Marco hissed. “This ain’t good.” He gripped the pistol in his hand tightly and tensed himself to rise, but Randy put a hand on his shoulder.
“Stay down,” Randy whispered. “We’ve got orders, remember? He’s caught, so we got to go back and tell Jenny to take over.”
Marco huffed, but stayed put. They watched as more guards came out of the building, weapons waving in every direction, but then Noah was hustled inside and the door slammed shut. They held their position for a minute, but when no other guards came out to start searching the area, Marco looked at Randy again.
“You’re right, bro,” he said. “Let’s head back.”
Despite the dim light, it wasn’t difficult to retrace their steps. When they got back to the safe house, a light tap on the back door was enough to rouse Soo Mi. She let the men in and sent them down the ladder, then followed them to learn what was going on.
“It may have been just dumb luck,” Marco said, “but I’m not really sure.” He sighed. “Noah was captured. He was running recon on the building when some soldiers stepped outside all of a sudden, like. Thing is, I’d swear they knew he was there when they came out, and they grabbed him in a hurry and dragged him inside. Last thing he told us before he went in was to come back and say it’s on you, Jenny, if he got caught, so that’s what we did.”
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Jenny cursed. “Dammit, I like Noah, and I don’t like very many people!” She crossed her arms and paced around the room for a moment, then turned back to Marco and Randy. “Okay, did you hear any gunshots?”
“No,” Randy said. “They drug him inside, and the last I saw of him before the door closed was him getting pushed down on the floor. Looked like they were going to search him, but I don’t think they were going to kill him.” He shrugged, then glanced for a second at Soo Mi before turning back to Jenny.
“Good, that means we’ve got an asset inside the building. With any luck, they might have tossed him right in with the targets. If it were me, I’d probably enlist their help in creating a diversion when we go in.” She turned to Jim Marino. “Break out the gear,” she said. “Rifles for everybody, but we take the grenades and C4, too.”
While Jim, with Neil helping, started passing out guns and grenades, Jenny turned back to Marco and Randy. “How many doors on the building? How many windows?”
“There were only three doors on the side we could see,” Marco said, “no windows.” He was standing slightly behind Randy, and suddenly wiggled his eyebrows and flicked his eyes at Randy and Soo Mi. Jenny raised her own eyebrows in a silly face, then relaxed them. It was enough to tell him she’d gotten the message he was trying to convey.
Soo Mi spoke up. “I’ve seen pictures of that building,” she said. “Your guys would have been looking at the back, but there is one window on each end and only one door and half a dozen windows on the front. The building is made of concrete blocks, but the cavities were filled with concrete as well, so it’s pretty solid.”
“Okay, thanks,” Jenny said, keeping her face bland. “Any idea on the interior layout?”
Soo Mi shook her head. “No, sorry.”
Jenny continued pacing for a moment, then suddenly stopped and looked around at the men. “Okay, we’re going to blow the three doors on the back of the building, then move in in teams of two each. Randy, you’re with me. Marco, you take the whiz kid, and that leaves Jim and Dave. This is going to be a wipeout, we take out anyone in uniform and any other opposition we run into. Everybody keep your ears open, because Noah’s gonna be trying to work with us from the inside once he hears the explosions, and I’d like very much to bring him out of this alive.”
“Damn right,” Neil said. “We’ve got to get him back!”
“And we will,” Jenny said emphatically. “Chill out, whiz kid.” She took the mini assault rifle Jim held out to her. “Everybody ready? Let’s do it!”
Soo Mi went up the ladder first, then confirmed that everything was clear, and the rest boiled out like bees from a disturbed hive. It was dark in the old farmhouse, but that only made it easier to see through the windows. After checking to be sure there was no visible activity, Jenny nodded once and Randy opened the door.
Randy and Marco went out first, and then the rest of the men followed. As soon as all of them were outside, Jenny spun away from the door and grabbed Soo Mi by the throat, pressing her face up close to the Korean girl’s own.
“I’m gonna say this one time,” she whispered. “I know you’re a traitor, and I can’t stand a traitor. I’ve got two questions for you, bitch. Answer me fast and you might live through this.”
Soo Mi’s eyes were wide as they could be, but she shook her head. “I’m not—”
“Wrong answer,” Jenny said. “Next one costs you your life. Who on my team is working wi
th you to sell us out? Remember, a wrong answer and you die right now!”
Soo Mi licked her lips quickly, then lowered her eyes. “It’s Mitchell,” she said. “He passed me the code name, Camelot, and the Chinese are screaming to get their hands on him.”
Jenny nodded. “One more answer and you’re home free. How do you call for us to be picked up and extracted?”
Soo Mi slowly pointed toward a cell phone lying on the kitchen table. Jenny glanced at it, then whispered, “Call it in now. Tell them two hours, pick us up here. Tell them we’ll be hot and that there will be no further communication tonight.” Soo Mi stared at her, and Jenny grinned. “You don’t think I’m going to leave you conscious, do you? Let you tip them off? Now, do it!”
Soo Mi picked up the phone and dialed a number. She spoke in broken English. “Ai, you get truck for eggs? Ai, eggs all ready, but I very tired, very tired. You come get eggs, two hour, okay? Okay, two hour! I sleep now!”
She ended the call and looked at Jenny. “That’s it. Eggs is the code for a pickup, they’ll be here in two hours. No problems, I promise.” Her eyes were still wide and tears were brimming over.
Jenny smiled at her. “Good girl,” she said. “And I said you’d live through this, right? Well, I lied.”
Soo Mi gasped and tensed, but Jenny spun the girl around and pulled her to the center of the room, holding her by her hair. The knife came from under her left arm, where she always kept it, and she thrust it forcefully into the small gap between the top cervical vertebra and the base of Soo Mi’s skull, then let the body fall where it stood. She reached down and drew the knife back out, wiped off the small amount of blood on the dead girl’s clothing, then slid it back into its sheath. A moment later, she had the body under covers in Soo Mi’s bed, and then slipped out the door.
“I had Soo Mi arrange for our ride out in two hours,” she said as she caught up to the men outside. “It’s all set.”
They moved out, still careful to watch for any possible observers, but still moving along fairly quickly. It took them slightly more than fifteen minutes to reach the point where they could see the building, and they were surprised to find no sign of any extra guard activity on its outside. Randy and Marco led them to the stand of trees where they had watched and waited, and they all settled in to catch a moment’s rest before the action began.
“Okay,” Jenny said after giving them time to catch their breath. “Those look like standard steel doors, so let’s go for the hinges and the doorknobs. Wrap C4 around each, and when it all goes off the doors will go flying. Ready? Let’s go.”
Jenny and Randy headed straight for the center door, and Dave and Jim took the one to its left, so Marco and Neil went to the right. They moved quickly, crouching low, and stopped just before making contact with the wall.
Marco pulled the C4 out of his pockets and broke it up, packing it around all three of the hinges on his door and then wrapping the rest around the doorknob. The detonator was set up with contact wires, so he stuck it into the putty on the doorknob to hold it in place and ran wires from it to each glob of the explosive. He looked up toward Jenny and held up a thumb, then took Neil twenty feet further down the wall. They crouched down on the ground beside the wall, with their backs to the door and covering their heads with their hands.
Jenny had the trigger, and as soon as she saw that Jim and Dave were also ready, she took Randy to the midpoint between her door and theirs, and they also crouched down and covered their ears.
Suddenly, a muffled screaming, several voices at once, could be heard coming from a lower level, and Jenny knew it had to be Noah’s doing. She grinned maniacally and dropped a thumb on the button.
The three blasts went off simultaneously and the doors flew dozens of feet away from the building. All six of them jumped instantly to their feet and ran toward the doors, then rushed inside. Jenny had taken the center door, the guard room, but the blast wave from the explosion had rendered the four men inside unconscious. She snatched open the inner door to the hallway, then she and Randy each thrust their heads out to look in both directions, yanking them back instantly.
“Looks clear,” Randy said, and Jenny nodded. She jumped through the door, deliberately placing herself against the far wall in the hallway and facing to the right, as Randy stepped out and faced left.
Jim and Dave appeared at their end of the hallway, just as two men burst out of the doorway that led to the stairs. Dave’s Tavor burped twice and they both fell, but voices could be heard shouting behind them. Both men put themselves against the wall and began moving toward the stairwell door.
At the other end of the building, Marco and Neil had rushed into the store room. There was no one inside, so they opened the inner door and looked out into the hallway. Jenny and Randy were already there, and a moment later they saw Dave and Jim. They started to look behind them just as the two soldiers came out of the stairwell, then spun as the sound of Dave’s gun caught them off guard.
Marco and Neil had each raised their weapons, but didn’t fire when they saw both men fall. Marco took a step toward Jenny, but Neil suddenly realized that he had glimpsed a door at the other end of the hall, and turned instinctively.
Sure enough, the door was only about fifteen feet away, in the short wall that made the end of the hallway. Neil took a step toward it and then froze as he saw the knob turning slowly. His Tavor came up instantly, so that it was aimed directly at the center of the door when it suddenly flew open.
Colonel Song stood there, dressed in gray slacks and a T-shirt, but incongruously without shoes or socks. He was holding a pistol in his hand, but he lowered it slowly when he realized there was a gun pointed at him.
Neil stared at him for a moment, then motioned quickly with the barrel of the gun for the man to get down. “Get down,” he shouted, “drop the gun and get down now!”
Song stood where he was and looked at Neil for a moment, but then Marco spun and added his own gun to the number of weapons aimed in his face. “All right,” Song said, then scowled and slowly knelt down. He laid the pistol on the floor beside his feet and then stretched himself out onto the floor with his hands behind his head.
Marco quickly stepped over him and checked the room he had come from, but there was no one else there. He snatched up the pistol and tucked it into his waistband, then grabbed Song by his collar and hoisted him to his feet. “How many downstairs?” he demanded, and then they heard gunfire from down below.
* * * * *
Noah had taken the can lid and looked at it closely, then folded a third of it over and knelt down. He rubbed the remaining edge on the concrete floor, putting the best edge on it that he could manage under the circumstances. “We’re going to put on a little act shortly,” he said. “Those guards are supposed to keep you in, but they’re also supposed to keep you safe. When I give the signal, I want all of you to start screaming. Unless those guys are really stupid, it will dawn on them that something bad happening to you will mean something bad happening to them. As soon as they come charging in here, I’ll take them out, but I want to give my team time to get here first. That should take about another forty minutes, so be ready.”
The three women continued to sit by the wall, but they were watching him intently. Dale knelt down beside him.
“You want those guys to think you’re killing us, right?” Dale asked.
“That’s the idea,” Noah said. “It’ll have to happen fast, so I hope nobody is squeamish.”
They looked down at the can lid. “You can only cut one throat at a time,” he said. “By the time you get the first one done, the other one is going to be ready to blow you away.”
“I don’t plan to give him the chance. As soon as they’re both in the room, I’m going to land on them hard, and I’ll worry about cutting them then. If I missed one or he gets away, it’s going to be up to you to get him down. Understood?”
Dale nodded, and Noah kept working the edge. He kept rotating the lid as he shaved it ac
ross the concrete, tiny bits of metal glittering onto the floor.
Noah’s internal clock had been ticking off minutes and seconds since he had been grabbed, and he was making educated guesses about what Jenny and the others were doing. Unless something went terribly wrong, Marco and Randy would lead the rest of them back to the stand of trees they had watched from, and Noah had no doubt Jenny was planning to blow open the doors on the building. That would mean they split into three pairs, coming in through all three doors on the back of the building. With any luck, they would capture the first floor easily. All that would remain were the soldiers in the sub level, and Noah hoped to take at least some of them out before they could put up any serious resistance.
When he judged that it had been something close to an hour since his capture, he positioned himself behind the door and nodded to the others. All three women began screaming at once, and Dale let out a bellow that sounded like rage. They kept it up, and it was only a dozen seconds later when a key rattled in the lock and the door flew open.
The two guards rushed in, and then stared in surprise at the four people who were sitting on the floor and screaming. The scene was so ridiculous that it confused them, but before they could recover the ability to think, Noah grabbed both of them and spun them around, then took them down to the floor.
At that moment, a terrific explosion seemed to take place above them, but they didn’t have time to worry about it. Dale leapt up and pushed the door shut, then jumped on the soldiers as well, as Noah yanked back the first man’s head and dragged the makeshift blade across his throat, and then reached for the other one. It was over in less than thirty seconds, as the severed carotid and jugular drained the blood from their brains and took them into a sleep they would never awaken from.
TWELVE
They heard the chatter of gunfire upstairs, but it was muffled. Noah snatched up one of the assault rifles the guards had been carrying and pulled the door open, as Dale grabbed the other and stepped in behind him. A quick look around into the hallway showed Noah several soldiers huddled there, apparently focusing their attention on the stairs. He stepped out and flicked the assault rifle’s selector to full auto, then squeezed the trigger and sprayed thirty rounds into them.