The Milestone Protocol

by Ernest Dempsey

  Sean bent to his knees and poked his pistol around the corner, firing three wild shots toward the position the men had been in.

  He heard a scream and knew that one of the rounds had struck true. Then a series of blasts sent him reeling back again for cover, nearly stumbling into Niki’s arms.

  Sean managed to catch himself and right his balance.

  He breathed calmly, waiting for several seconds. Then he heard what he’d been waiting for. A barrage of pops from around the corner told him Tommy and Adriana had successfully flanked the three men. His suspicion was confirmed when Tommy shouted, “Clear!”

  Sean and the other two maneuvered around the corner to find Adriana and Tommy standing over the three dead men—each with the same tattoos all the others displayed on their necks.

  “Anything around back?” Sean asked.

  “Only a bunch of bodies,” Adriana replied. “How many did Emily bring with her? The entire Axis agency?”

  Sean shook his head. “No. Just a few good guns. I let them know we were in Russia. Then earlier, I shared my location with Emily. She’s been following us.”

  Niki nodded, impressed with Sean’s foresight.

  Sean felt his phone vibrate. He took it out and answered, already knowing who it was.

  “Good timing,” he said dryly.

  “Not done yet,” Emily replied. She appeared around the corner behind Sean, walking purposefully toward him with the phone pressed against her ear. She wore a black turtleneck with a white windbreaker over it and white cargo pants with black boots, and held a .45 SIG Sauer in her right hand that swung past her hip. “We have four that ran into the barn behind the farmhouse. Dak and June have it covered. Tara and Alex are out front. Unfortunately, one vehicle got away. Looked like Sorenson, Clark, and one of his goons. I think I got the bodyguard in the side, but he still escaped.”

  “June’s here?” Tommy asked, sounding hopeful.

  “Out of all that, you got June is here?” Sean scolded. Then he winked. Then he turned back to Emily. “What do you think, partner?”

  Her right eyebrow lifted, matching the suspicion in her voice. “Been a while since you called me that, Agent Zero,” she said with a wry smirk.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Sean warned. He looked over at the barn. “Seeing how this property belongs to the Cult of Thoth, not to mention our former friend Magnus Sorenson, I think we should have ourselves a little cookout.”

  “Cookout?” Tabitha wondered, unable to hide the confused concern in her voice.

  The others followed his gaze to the rickety old barn.

  “You’re not thinking of—”

  Sean cut her off. “Oh, absolutely.”

  Tommy stared at the wooden structure. “He is. He definitely is.”

  40

  Russia

  Dark smoke poured into the sky, billowing out through the big barn windows on the second story. Sean watched as the flames crept up the walls. He knew it would get hotter by the second inside, though he figured the smoke would probably force the henchmen from their hiding spot before they ever had a chance to burn alive.

  Then again, Sean recalled the incident with the man on the rooftop biting the cyanide pill to end his life before he could be arrested or interrogated.

  It was possible, but Sean knew that deep down, every human feared being burned alive, or even burned after death. There was something terrifying about it. It had been a powerful motivator during the Inquisition, and every witch-hunt and heretic drive since. Even that was somehow different than being consumed by a barn fire.

  There was also the chance that the cyanide wouldn’t kill the victims. Sean had heard stories of people who’d tried to kill themselves in a similar fashion to the man on the rooftop, only to survive the episode with permanent, horrific damage to their internal organs and tissue.

  He pondered this as he stared pensively at the big window of the barn. Even from a good distance of fifty feet, he could feel the searing heat radiating from the flames.

  “You know,” Tommy said, standing next to his friend, “fire departments will see this from miles away. So will inquisitive neighbors.”

  “True,” Sean agreed. It was another contingency he’d considered, but setting fire to the barn was the best way to ensure everyone with him remained safe.

  Alex snuffed out the makeshift torch he’d used to light a bale of old hay next to the wall. Then he trudged over to where Sean and Tommy stood. Emily, Dak, and June covered the backside of the barn, with Tara on the left and Niki on the right. Tara kept her AR15 rifle aimed at the open window. Sean and Tommy were just as ready to engage the enemy, despite their casual stances with newly equipped matching rifles hanging from their shoulders above their abdomens.

  “I hope this works,” Alex said.

  “It will.” Sean sounded confident, but with every passing second, he feared that either the men inside were dead, or the fire department would soon be on the way.

  Suddenly, two men appeared at the top of the barn with their hands raised. Two more were behind them, covering their mouths and coughing.

  One of the guys stumbled and fell out of the window headfirst. He landed on his shoulder and his head bent in an awkward direction, but he rolled over screaming and kicking, grabbing at the shoulder with his opposite hand.

  “And that’s how you break a clavicle,” Tommy quipped.

  Sean snorted. “Yep.”

  The other three men threw their weapons down to the ground and then climbed down the wooden ladder.

  Sean and his crew kept their guns aimed at the men until the three threw themselves on the ground with their hands over their heads.

  “Almost like they’ve done this routine before, huh?” Alex noted.

  “Almost,” Adriana agreed.

  “Throw some water on that fire, Alex,” Sean ordered.

  “You got it, chief.”

  “Hey, I’m chief,” Tommy whined.

  “Sorry, boss.” Alex trotted back down toward the barn where he’d left a thick hose laid out on the snow. It looked too old not to have any leaks, but after testing it out with the high-pressure outlet they discovered close to the field, Alex discovered the hose still worked.

  He reached into the in-ground covering and pulled on the valve. The farm may have been off-grid, but they still had a source of water.

  Sean recalled seeing high-pressure water outlets like that before when he’d worked Sorenson’s property in the States. He’d used them countless times to water new plants, or old ones in the hot southern summers. They weren’t as powerful as a firehose, but put out much more water than a standard hose outlet.

  Alex picked up the hose and sprayed the walls of the barn, splashing the cold liquid over the flames in what—at first—was a losing battle.

  He aimed high, though, and soaked the wood around the flames before it could ignite the rest of the building. Then, Alex gradually worked the stream back and forth, and downward, extinguishing the fire much faster than anyone expected.

  One side of the barn was scorched black from the blaze. It still smoldered, so Alex continued to spray water on it to make sure it didn’t reignite.

  Meanwhile, Sean and the rest of the group, their weapons raised, approached the men on the ground.

  “Don’t move,” Adriana ordered. “Keep your hands on the backs of your heads.”

  Sean liked the take-charge sound in her voice. He’d always appreciated strong women, and she was the strongest he’d ever met.

  The one who’d fallen out of the window continued to groan. His left arm and shoulder were way out of their normal position. Sean figured it was probably a combination clavicle fracture and shoulder dislocation.

  “The more you move,” he warned, “the more it’s going to hurt.” Sean had experienced a few dislocated shoulders in college and knew exactly how uncomfortable it could be. The broken clavicle, on the other hand, was something he’d never experienced, but he heard it was one of the most painful bre
aks a person could suffer.

  The henchman took Sean’s words to heart and stopped rolling around as much, though the pain he was in was written on his face. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his neck.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Adriana asked, peering at them with venom in her eyes. Her thoughts were, no doubt, far away in Madrid, where she feared her father and Miyamoto were under attack.

  “I figured I’d let Emily decide that. Or maybe Tabitha.”

  The two women approached along with the others who’d been flanking the barn.

  “What about me?” Tabitha asked.

  Tommy fielded the question first. “We were wondering what to do with these four since we don’t really need to interrogate them.”

  “He’s right,” Sean said. “We already know where Magnus is going, so they’re no use to us for information.”

  The three men on their knees hung their heads, while the injured one looked up desperately into the eyes of the man he figured was the leader. “Please,” he said to Sean, “if you let us go, you will never see us again. I swear it. Just let me get some medical attention. Please.”

  “No, I’m not letting you go.”

  “I thought you said I get to make that call,” Emily said, half joking.

  Adriana merely stared at them with furious loathing. Niki did as well. These had been his brothers, now he found himself on the other side of the war he’d helped his master start. So much had changed in the last few hours. He’d questioned his motives, his reasoning, but when Odin—rather, Magnus Sorenson—had said what he said, and so callously, there was no going back to the order after that.

  “Be my guest,” Sean said, extending his hand toward the four prisoners.

  “You’re doing fine. Besides, you have more on them than I do. I just got here.”

  “Fair point,” Sean agreed and faced the men again. “We know you are all with the Cult of Thoth, the ancient order that has served that deity and his designs for the planet for thousands of years.” Emily’s poker face didn’t crack at the information. She could tell Sean wasn’t bluffing, and listened as he went on.

  “We also know Odin’s plans for the planet, and what he intends to do to billions of people.” He watched each of the captives intently. “You also know of this plan, yes?”

  The men slowly nodded. The injured one nodded fiercely. “Yes. We know. Please. We’ll take you to one of the arks. There is a bunker near here. Less than an hour away. We can get you access before the machine is activated.”

  Adriana cut into the inquisition. “Next question,” she said. “Is the Fellowship carrying out an attack in Madrid?”

  The hurt one nodded again. “Yes. There are enemies of the Fellowship there. We only heard rumors about it, though. We’re not sure who the target is. Only those who were sent know those details. I swear, if I knew more I would—”

  His voice was cut off by the muted sounds of gunfire as Adriana squeezed the trigger of a pistol. The first bullet burrowed through the injured man’s skull and into the ground behind him. Then she turned to the other three and emptied her magazine, executing every one of them.

  “Whoa!” Tabitha shouted when Adriana’s trigger clicked several times.

  The men fell in various directions, dead long before they hit the ground.

  “What are you doing? I thought we were questioning them. And you just killed four men that had surrendered.”

  Adriana turned on Tabitha. The blazing fury in Adriana’s eyes was enough to melt steel. “These four men just admitted they were complicit in a plan to murder billions. They also told me that my father’s estate is under attack. There was no remorse from any of them. If we let them go, they will rejoin others, and could eventually shoot one of us, or all of us, in the back. And I will not send them to a prison to spend the rest of their lives talking about the good old days to any listening, sympathetic ear. From one come many.”

  “Isn’t the quote from many, one?” Tommy asked. “E pluribus unum?”

  She ignored him. “They are a cult,” Adriana continued. “Just like a terror cell, one can create ten. Ten can create a hundred. It spreads like a virus. We already know that they have infiltrated most of society. They had to die. As do all the rest.”

  Tabitha couldn’t think of an argument beyond that.

  Sean drew close to her. “Do you want me to go to Spain with you? We can stop them. Find your dad.”

  “No,” Adriana said. “Then everything they have fought for, trained me for, will have been in vain. Generations of my family worked toward this time, this threat. It’s my destiny.”

  “You can’t go alone.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not going at all. By the time I got there, it would be too late.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Adriana appreciated his support, his willingness to let the world burn just to help her and her father, but that wasn’t something her father would want. It wasn’t what he’d spent his life preparing her and himself for.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Adriana said. She didn’t really believe it, not for her father. For all she knew, he was already dead. “We have to get to Svalbard and stop Magnus.”

  “Svalbard?” a husky voice said from off to the right. The group turned and saw Dak approaching with a long rifle slung over his right shoulder. “What’s in Svalbard?”

  “So, you’re Dak Harper,” Sean said. He offered his hand. Dak shook it firmly, noting the equal strength in Sean’s grip, perhaps even stronger.

  “Depends on the day of the week,” Dak answered dryly.

  “Touché.”

  Dak looked around the group, his emerald eyes searching them for answers. He threw up his hands. “Seriously, what’s in Svalbard? That’s a Norwegian island, right? Way up north?”

  “We believe there’s an ancient pyramid there,” Tommy answered. “And if there is, it’s probably the control center for a doomsday machine that will kill two-thirds of the planet’s population. We have to get there, stop Magnus, and shut it down.”

  Dak tilted his head to the side as if pondering the information. “Sounds like a fun challenge,” he said. Then he looked out at the dozens of bodies strewn across the backyard and around both sides of the house. “So, are we going to clean this up or just leave it for someone else?”

  Sean surveyed the carnage. “Let the birds have them. Thoth was the bird god, after all. We have a plane to catch.”

  “And probably a boat or two,” Tommy added.

  The group started toward the road, but Sean lingered back with his wife. When the others were out of earshot, he looked deep into her dark brown eyes. “Are you going to be okay?”

  She fought back a tear, the way only she could. He knew she was stronger than him when it came to such things. When his parents had been threatened, Sean plowed through the emotions as best he could, but what no one else saw after the ordeal was how the stress affected him. He was a wreck for days, but eventually got through it knowing that his parents were okay.

  In this case, there was no way to know if Diego was all right. He considered calling his father-in-law, but if the man were knee deep in defending the family land, he wouldn’t answer. And a phone call might be a distraction that ended his life.

  “I’ll be fine,” Adriana said. “My father can take care of himself. I don’t care what Magnus says. He could throw an army at Papa, and he would come out okay.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. When she’d finished, she felt much better. “Come on. We have to stop Magnus.”

  “We won’t be able to just chase him down,” Tommy said. “That man controls everything. His order has infiltrated everything, probably right down to the street cameras in cities all over the world. Their resources are infinite. Even with the IAA plane, I don’t think we could slip by his net without being detected. For all we know, he could tell some foreign military entity that we’re a terrorist threat and have us shot out of the sky.”

  “That’s not our only
problem,” Niki added. Everyone turned to face the young man. He spoke with the confidence of a man ten or twenty years older. “As he said,” Niki indicated to Tommy, “there is no way that you’ll be able to fly your private jet to Svalbard, partly because of the reasons he highlighted but also because the airport there is controlled by the Fellowship. Odin…Magnus,” he corrected, “has most of the customs officials and security personnel chosen from his ranks. There’s no way we could get through without detection. They’ll be looking for most of us.”

  “Not us, though,” Tara said, motioning to Alex.

  “Perhaps,” Niki hedged, “but if you’re associated with them”—he pointed at Tommy and Sean again—“then they are already running a list of people who fit that category. You two would be on that list.”

  The group fell silent. Snow flurries fluttered from the gray sky above, drifting around the group and between each of them.

  “I may know someone who could be of assistance,” Dak said, speaking up. Everyone looked to him expectantly. “He was in Portugal, but right now he’s in Germany. I believe he could help us with some papers, false identities, disguises, that sort of thing. If we want to get into Svalbard, that might be our best bet.”

  Sean liked the idea, except for one big problem. “You said he’s in Germany? What city?”

  “Heidelberg.”

  Tommy sighed. “That’s too far away. He’ll never get here in time.”

  “I have another idea,” Emily chimed. “First, I need to make a call. I have a friend in Helsinki that might be able to get us to Svalbard. They run a cargo business exporting goods to Russia and Estonia. Short flights back and forth. If he’s willing to help us, I’d say he’s our best bet to get to the island.”

  “We won’t have much time,” Sean said. “Magnus took the diamond. And he has a head start.” He looked at Emily. “Make the call. We need to mount up and get back to Moscow.”

  41

  Spain