“I’m not sure I like your metaphor.”
“Then it feels like we got a Mexican standoff going on in here. Is that better? Is that politically correct to say anymore?”
“Can’t we just call it a standoff?”
“A standoff is usually two opposing parties. The Mexican variant is between three.”
“I think we have more than three opposing points of view in here,” I replied. “More like an Irish standoff. Nobody has any idea of what’s going on, and nobody trusts anyone.”
“Isn’t that just as racist?”
“Not if you’re personally a member of the group you’re making fun of.” My family had roots in Ireland.
“Thanks for clearing up the rules. Lauren, what’s the status?”
My wife was checking the guns we’d collected from the dead Secret Service agents on our escape. “We’ve got three working MP5 submachine guns and six full magazines, three half full. I mean, operational as far as I can tell without firing them. Two Glocks and six clips. Plus, Archer’s weapon.”
“And the Glock Damon has,” I said.
“Yeah, and that.”
“One of you should get that away from him,” Archer suggested.
Nobody volunteered.
“Who gets the weapons when we get there?” Chuck asked.
“I think we keep these in our end of the truck,” Archer replied. “Let the geek squad do backup.”
“Speaking of that,” Chuck whispered, then raised his voice, “Mr. Jakob, how’s the top up of that EMP gadget you used back at the river?”
“About half charged, Mr. Mumford. That’s about the best we can do. I can’t afford to pull much more juice from Selena’s batteries, not if we want to retreat afterward. Finding somewhere to plug the truck in might be tricky, but I will keep my eyes peeled.”
“I noticed the boxes in the back.” Behind Chuck’s seat was access to the trunk. He had already opened the four crates back there and inspected them with Archer, but they couldn’t make sense of what was in them.
“Nothing that blows up, Mr. Mumford.”
“But stuff that could be useful?”
“If we had more time, perhaps. We might have enough when we get there.”
“I doubt that. At least, I’m not waiting.”
“So what’s the idea when we arrive?” the senator asked.
“We need to do some reconnaissance,” Archer replied.
I said, “This thing is invisible, right?”
“Sort of,” Tyrell replied.
“I’ve got a plan,” Chuck said. “If those Chechen bastards are there, Susie and I have some surprises they won’t be expecting. I know them. We spent almost two weeks with them.”
“With one of them,” I said.
“The most important one. The leader.”
“You think.”
“Yeah, that’s what I think, Mike. Jesus, are you with me or not?”
“Of course I am.” Wasn’t I?
I glanced up at Tyrell.
But maybe it wasn’t the Chechens at all. Too many things were bothering me to concentrate.
If there were no coincidences, what about Tyrell Jakob showing up in the nick of time to rescue us? Did he even really save our lives? Would we have been able to outrun those bug-drones in the boat?
Maybe we hadn’t even needed him.
If I hadn’t told the senator to head for the shore, maybe right now we would have been in Washington, surrounded by a fresh detail of the Secret Service, checked into a comfortable hotel with crisp sheets and room service, talking to more FBI agents.
Or we might be all dead.
And maybe Tyrell was leading us straight into a trap. That was my biggest worry.
Tyrell was enigmatic. He used our surnames to address us, like we were about to go rowing in Cambridge. Chuck had started doing it now, too. It had a charming way of disarming, but why was Tyrell sweet-talking us?
Why did he need us at all?
Maybe the goal of whoever had attacked us wasn’t to kill Senator Seymour, but to capture him. What was the bigger plan? Something was going on in a larger scope.
Or maybe they wanted me. Or someone else here?
Maybe they needed Damon, which Tyrell had even made clear from the start—that this was why he had come to the senator’s house. The Chechens had needed Damon in the first attack, and maybe there was something they needed him for now. What was it that I wasn’t seeing?
If any of these theories were true, we were now willingly heading—I caught sight of Olivia’s cartoon—like Peppa and her whole family of pigs to the slaughterhouse.
I checked my watch. Twenty-two minutes till arrival.
“Mr. Jakob?” Chuck asked. “Do you think you could explain a bit more about your EMP tool? We might need to use it again.”
Tyrell replied, “I am quite sure we will.”
They began talking about technical specifications, but my mind wandered.
I was the one who had told the senator to head for the man waving at us when we were in the boat. I made the decision to head for Tyrell. Did I recognize him? Did that have something to do with it? I had pulled us on this path, and now we were being dragged back to the cabin, straight into the birthplace of the nightmares that had plagued my sleep for the past six years.
“Strap in,” Chuck said to me. “We’re almost there.”
“Oh my God,” Damon said, pointing out the window. “What is that?”
Chapter 18
SUSIE DIDN’T HAVE much time.
She checked her watch. 7:24 p.m. Six minutes to go.
Twilight faded into the edge of night as late-season crickets chirped in the long wet grass. Susie squeezed through a tunnel of rock to the outcropping between two mammoth fir trees that guarded the lower edge of their property. One step at a time, as quiet as an Iroquois on the hunt.
She knew each root and rock on these trails like familiar lullabies underfoot.
Muttering quiet curses, she scolded herself for not grabbing night vision goggles before she’d left the house. She might be able to navigate the woods here blindfolded, but she could guarantee her adversaries had their gear on. The failing light would soon make her infrared signature an easy target soon.
On the other hand, she might not have night vision gear, but they would—which was her ticket to getting back into the house. Jujutsu was her favorite martial art. Use the enemy’s advantage to their disadvantage.
Men tended to be big and strong, which meant heavy and clumsy.
But why hadn’t she grabbed an extra layer or two of fleece? They’d been right there on the wall. At the time, she had been so focused on weapons she hadn’t thought of the longer game, what would happen if she got stuck outside. The cold. The dark. To be honest, part of her had thought the person at the door really was just a kid who needed help.
Susie grabbed the first rung of the wooden ladder up into the blind.
Under the armor she had strapped on, she only had a long-sleeved cotton shirt and yoga pants and sneakers—her standard cottage outfit, now soaked toe to tip. The temperature plummeted on the mountain the moment the sun went down behind the ridge. The first star of the night appeared in the indigo sky.
Not a star, she reminded herself. Venus rose over the scimitar of a crescent moon.
Her teeth chattered.
She clenched her jaw. Stars broke through the deepening purple-black sky. She scanned the grass and dark underbrush below the sagging lower branches of the fir trees. Strained to listen over the forced attempt to suppress her own breathing. The chirps of a snowy tree cricket pierced the air as she held still. She counted: one, two. That was it. Only two chirps in about fifteen seconds. That meant it was forty-two Fahrenheit.
She had to hurry. Only three minutes to go.
Ellarose was out there somewhere too, and her daughter didn’t have much fat on her bones. Chuck always said that it was good to have a reserve lard tank, but Susie thought that was mostly an excuse f
or his belly. He said she would stop laughing if she ended up in a frozen lake. Ellarose had probably taken her North Face jacket, but Susie doubted she’d grabbed a hat or gloves.
Ellarose got cold very easily.
Another rung on the ladder, and then another.
Susie’s weapon was slung over her back as she climbed. The attackers hadn’t found this hunting blind. It was well hidden in these fir trees, and it wasn’t really for hunting. More of a treehouse for the kids to watch deer and elk that passed through the property.
She hadn’t heard any alarms go off.
That meant the house was still secure. The power was still on. The generator was in one corner of the cement foundation and vented outside, which made it impossible to cut off without entering the house itself.
If no alarms had gone off, it meant nobody had broken through a window or set off any of the interior motion detectors. Susie had set the system to secure as she ran out of the house, after she was sure Bonham had gotten himself down into the safe room. Her son was still okay. She was positive that nobody had gotten in there yet.
The game now was to lure the prey in. Get as many of them as close as possible.
First, Susie had to get back inside herself.
She was the bait.
Slowly, slowly, she raised her head into the treehouse. Nothing. Nobody there. A small exhale of relief and she climbed in, got to her knees, then retrieved her weapon and unclipped the cover from the sight. Checked her watch.
One minute to go.
She slipped onto her belly and sighted along her barrel, staring through a gap in the blind. The grass and trees around the house looked empty. No movement that she could detect. No lights but the ones that should be there. Except.
What were those red lights hovering in the deep indigo sky?
Red dots in the distance. Not just one or two, but a whole cloud of them. Airplanes? Was the Air Force conducting an operation? Helicopters? Maybe if she set off the house flares, they would bring whoever it was over here.
No time to think about that.
She unclipped the 37-millimeter smoke bombs and explosive ammo and laid them out on the wooden deck. Loaded one of the explosive rounds into the launcher.
The glowing hands on her watch read 7:29 p.m. With one hand cupped to block the light, Susie took out her cell phone and turned it on. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. She needed to reset the dilation of her pupils. The bright blue light of the screen blinded her for a second. She checked the bars. This close, the phone had reconnected to the house’s Wi-Fi. Maybe it would give her a chance.
Damn it.
Still no outgoing internet, but she could text Bonham. She considered doing it, but the time to tap in a message would eat up precious seconds, and what would she say?
She turned the phone off but kept it out.
Right on cue, the exterior lights of the cabin clicked on. Bright floodlights lit up the log walls of the house, the brick walls of the outhouse, all sides of the workshop and outbuildings. The grounds lit up like daylight.
She scanned back and forth.
To the left, just past the jungle gym, she detected motion. The bright lights had to be a surprise, but she knew exactly when they would turn on. Her attackers, trying to encircle the house, must have on their night vision gear, she wagered. Any grunts or movement in her field of view would expose them.
Off to the right, in a stand of ferns, she heard a quiet curse. Farther along the side of the house, past the back deck, slight movement in the hydrangeas.
Susie clicked her phone back on, accessed the house lighting through an app, and shut off the lights. The scene ahead of her dropped back into blackness a second later. She pocketed her phone. Even in the darkness, she knew exactly where she was aiming. She knew every patch of switchgrass and milkweed and goldenrod.
A hollow thump and flash as the 37-millimeter launcher released the first explosive round. In quick succession, she reloaded, aimed, and fired another to the far side of the house. The first round found its target and detonated. Incoming muzzle fire lit up from her left and right. She loaded a smoke bomb and fired one, reloaded and fired off another.
That was enough. She needed to get out of here. She got to her feet. Stepped forward.
Dropped into empty space.
She held her weapon up and to her chest, squeezed her arms tight to her body and straightened her legs. She’d seen Chuck do this a hundred times, but had been too chicken to try it herself. Until now. He said you needed the same tucked-in body shape the SEALs had when they jumped out of helicopters into the water, except she wasn’t going to hit anything liquid.
Her back and head slammed back as she hit, then pressed down as her body shot forward. Chuck had installed a children’s slide. She needed to get this dismount exactly right. An instant later she went airborne. Susie leaned her body up and put her left foot forward.
It jammed into the dirt.
Off-balance, she stumbled forward and managed to get her right foot out in time to catch herself and propel forward into a run. Bullets snapped into the tree branches twenty feet overhead, the cracks of the shots echoing off the cliffs to the north of the house.
Smoke billowed into the air from the hissing casings she had launched. She ran into the cover of it. Scanned back and forth, leading with her AR-15’s barrel. Muzzle flashes indicated they were still firing at the hunting blind, now fifty feet behind and twenty feet over her head. She sprinted forward to the sunken garden path that led around the back to the patio doors.
That first explosive round had found its target. She was sure she glimpsed the shadow of a body cartwheeling away from its blast. She didn’t bother to watch the second one hit. What she needed more than anything was ten seconds of confusion. Their night vision goggles were off by now, their retinas still overexposed. Their fire and attention directed somewhere she wasn’t.
She plunged into the billowing cloud from one of her smoke bombs. This path brought her between the hiding spots of the attackers she had seen from the blind. If she cut between them and to the house, she could unlock the exterior doors with the fob in her pocket. Once locked behind her, the ballistic glass and plastic coatings would make it tough for them to get inside. All she needed was ten-second head start.
She just needed enough time to get downstairs and into the safe room with Bonham.
From there, she could use the webcams to watch them breach the exterior and enter the house. She would wait, make sure as many were inside as she could.
And then blow the hallway.
Chuck had installed explosive devices in the downstairs corridor.
The basement was off-limits, nobody ever went down there except with mom or dad. Susie had argued with Chuck, said it was dangerous, but this had been at the height of his paranoid phase last year, when he’d dug the tunnel from the Baylor cottage to theirs. When he was in one of those moods, she had to let him have his way.
Now, she could kiss him.
Through the smoke, she could see the patio door. Someone yelled off to her left. They were moving to flank the tree blind. She kept low and felt for the key fob in her pocket. Stepping quietly, she reached the edge of the deck. She pressed the fob and unlocked the house doors.
The gunfire around her stopped. Voices went quiet.
A loud ringing punctuated the moment of silence. Susie was one step up toward the patio.
She froze in a sickening realization the noise was coming from her own phone. It rang again. It had to be Bonham. “Damn, it, not now.”
She got to the top of the stairs and reached for the door. She scanned to the right, looked at the workshop and thought she saw something shimmer. Was there something in the driveway?
A man stood to the side of the workshop and stared into the middle of the driveway as well, staring at empty space. What was he doing? Why wasn’t he keeping in cover? What was he looking at?
Her left hand snapped back as if jerked by a string. Her head whi
pped sideways.
Two deafening cracks.
Susie staggered and ducked.
A man fired again at her from ten feet away, advancing steadily along the flagstone path from the garage. Her AR-15 tumbled from her right hand. She swung around and grappled for it.
The man reached the bottom of the patio stairs. Still five feet below her, but he had to be at least six-three and two hundred pounds. Dressed in full body armor. And coming at her fast.
She didn’t have time to retrieve her weapon.
Time slowed down.
Size didn’t matter.
Technique and surprise were everything. Focus, she said to herself. Be in the moment. Unstable and already spinning from the impact of the rounds, Susie ignored her weapon now sailing away. She bent her legs and used her momentum to come around fully, and kept her eyes on the man.
At a jog, he bounded up two steps at a time. His weapon pointed at her. He fired again, a glancing round that Susie barely felt.
She launched herself straight at him.
He didn’t expect it. He fired point-blank at her midsection.
This time, she felt the gut shot. Agony mushroomed in her abdomen. The armor wasn’t designed to stop high-velocity rounds at this range, but she had no choice. With her left hand she dug her nails under his neck guard and ricocheted off his shoulder. She fell into open space behind him.
Dropped five feet toward the garden, her body accelerating.
She used both of their bodies’ opposite momentums to yank on his neck. Her left shoulder ripped agonizingly as it dislodged—he was twice her weight—but he jerked back. They pirouetted in the air for a long beat before slamming into the wet flagstones in a mess of arms and legs.
The man was built like an ox.
He bounced off the ground and was already halfway back to his feet. But one thing jujutsu had taught Susie. A good grip was worth more than all the muscle in the world. Lancing pain screamed through her shoulder, but she kept her fingers locked on his neck guard, her legs now wrapped around his torso. He lifted her from the ground as he rose. His weapon up and forward, but this was close contact fighting now.
Susie had the Bowie knife in her right hand.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 12
