End Game

by John Gilstrap

  Boxers’ glare screamed, I’ll kill you if you do. Cell numbers were traceable, and therefore sensitive.

  But the offer was one that intrigued Jonathan. They were working blind tonight. An extra set of eyes on the outside was a damned good idea. “Tell you what I’ll do,” he said.

  “Scorpion.” Only Boxers could put so much menace in a single word.

  “Relax, Big Guy.” Jonathan worked his way back out of his ruck and dug into its main pocket, from which he produced two standard, commercially available cheap walkie-talkies, the kind anyone could pick up in the mall. A well-learned lesson over the years preached that sometimes, as the shit hit the fan, the simplest technology worked best. He turned them both on, and keyed the mike for one of them. The feedback squeal told him that they were functioning.

  He handed one of the radios to Dawn. “Just push that button to talk,” he said. “But please don’t do it unless it’s really, really important. I don’t want to be sneaking up on somebody only to have your voice blast through the night telling me that the stars have come out. Follow me?”

  Dawn turned the radio over in her hands, examining it. “I understand.”

  “Be sure you do,” Boxers growled. Seeing their fearful reaction, he added, “I’m nowhere near as nice as my little friend.” He shouldered his ruck as if it weighed nothing, and with the suitcase of Raven controls in one hand, and the empty aircraft sack in the other, he left.

  “He means no harm,” Jonathan said to the family. “But please do us all a favor and don’t piss him off.”

  “So, what happened?” Graham asked. He examined Jolaine’s wounds as best he could without the use of his hands. She wasn’t particularly cut up, but man, was she bruised. Her left eye had swollen shut, and her jaw was swollen. “Who did this to you?”

  “Who do you think?” She spoke through nearly clenched teeth.

  “I mean, which one of them?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He took a few seconds to answer. “Yes, it does.”

  “Let’s just say they took turns.”

  “Why?” he asked. “You don’t know anything.”

  Jolaine closed her eyes against an obvious spasm of pain. “I kept telling them that,” she said. “It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. How did they get you?”

  “They were transferring me to a foster home,” Graham said. “They killed everybody but me.” Until he said the words, he’d blocked the images of those nice people’s murders from his mind. He couldn’t even remember their names.

  “I’m sorry,” Jolaine said. “That’s not right.”

  “That’s why I had to tell those assholes something,” Graham said. “This . . . thing has killed too many people. It’s hurt too many people. It has to stop.”

  Jolaine gave a wry chuckle. “I don’t know what their verification procedure is, but once they find out, my money says the end will be nearer than we want.”

  “You’re giving up,” Graham said. “You can’t do that.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Come on, Graham. Sometimes reality has to trump hope. It’s freezing in here.”

  “Give it time,” Graham said. “This is nothing.” He walked around to stare into Jolaine’s face. “You can’t go pessimist on me, Jolaine. Not now. We’ve got time.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know! Goddammit, I don’t freaking know, all right? Something. Our only other option is nothing, and that one sucks.”

  Jolaine fought another spasm.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” Graham said.

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t protect you better.”

  Graham kept walking to keep his feet from going numb.

  “Why did Mom set me up?” he asked. He spoke the words without emotion.

  “Now who’s being pessimistic?”

  “I’m serious, Jolaine. She gave me that code knowing that people would come to get me. Do you think she knew it would come to this?”

  Jolaine inhaled, hocked once, and spat a wad of blood. “I think she was scared,” she said. “I think she’d been shot and she was just trying to do something.”

  “But you said that the code was for some kind of bomb.”

  “Actually, I said I thought that’s what it might be.”

  “Do you still?”

  Another spasm, and she didn’t even try to speak. She just nodded.

  Graham stopped pacing and turned as it dawned on him: “And these guys are terrorists,” he said. “Mom wanted them to have the code. That makes my parents terrorists.”

  Jolaine scowled as well as her battered features would allow as she considered what he’d just said. “Oh, my God.”

  Linus, the librarian in Graham’s head, was moving like crazy to arrange all the logic cards so he could read them. “She didn’t set me up for torture,” Graham said. “She set me up to help terrorists.”

  How was that for a shit-sicle? How could she do that? How could they do that—Dad had to be in on it, too, right? Well, maybe not the part that directly involved Graham—Dad had already been killed by then—but the rest of it. The terrorism stuff. He paced again. He was thinking about his parents—the people who had brought him into the world, wiped his butt, and preached right and wrong. He knew he should be sad for their injuries, but all he could feel was anger.

  “Holy shit, Jolaine, how could they?”

  “I’m really sorry—”

  “Wait,” Graham said. “No, no, no, that doesn’t make sense, either. Why would the terrorists attack and kill them if they were all on the same side?”

  “Maybe Uncle Sam found out,” Jolaine offered, but her tone sounded more like thinking out loud than forwarding an actual theory.

  “No,” Graham snapped. It was a stupid theory. “You heard them yelling to each other. That wasn’t English. No one yelled, ‘Freeze, FBI,’ or whatever they say in real life.” He stopped pacing again. “Gregory,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Gregory. That was the name of the man in the front door. Gregory. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, they know. I’m sorry, they know.’ Remember?”

  Jolaine seemed to search her memory. “Okay.”

  “The people we ran away from were the people who knew.”

  “Knew what?” Jolaine asked. She looked like she was having difficulty keeping up.

  “I don’t know. Jesus, how could I know?”

  “Graham, I’m not even sure I know what you’re talking about anymore.”

  He wasn’t either. He was trying to think his way through a problem. Finally, Linus dealt his last, most important card. “Oh, shit,” Graham said. “There’s another set of people trying to kill us.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know who, but I know why.”

  Jolaine saw it, too. “To keep these guys from getting the codes.”

  “Exactly,” Graham said. His sense of triumph over solving a problem was quashed two seconds later by the obvious rejoinder. He shot a panicked look to Jolaine.

  “They won’t bother to torture,” she said, connecting the dots for herself. “They just want to kill you.”

  In a rush, he realized the truth of Jolaine’s earlier words. Sometimes, reality really did trump hope.

  Tears pressed his eyes as he faced Jolaine. “We really are going to die tonight, aren’t we?”

  The door to the freezer slammed open. Teddy stood there with three of his friends. His right hand held a sledgehammer by its neck.

  His eyes showed murder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Jonathan almost regretted his decision not to let LeBron show him the clearing in the woods. Driving with the lights off and NVGs in place, it took two passes to find the spot.

  “There it is,” Jonathan said, finally. It wasn’t the clearing he’d seen so much as the tire indentations that led to it. Once spotted, it was obvious. “Either they’re not the only ones, or they come here a lot,” he said.

  “You ask me, every inch of
this Godforsaken town is worn thin,” Boxers said. He threw the transmission into park. “You’re sure you want to go with full rucks?” he said.

  Jonathan shrugged. “It’s the neighborhood. If gangbangers decide to break in, I don’t care if they take possession of the Raven, but I wouldn’t sleep well if we gave them explosives and detonators.”

  “Call it urban renewal,” Big Guy said and he opened his door.

  “Full soldier,” Jonathan said. “We don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.” That was his term for full body armor, complete with chest plate and Kevlar helmet. It was unwieldy and heavy as hell. Boxers pointed to any opportunity he could find not to wear it, but the lack of push-back this time told Jonathan that he saw the risks, too.

  When they were fully kitted up, they each carried their preferred rifles—Jonathan a suppressed M27 and Boxers a suppressed HK417—and a suppressed 4.6 millimeter HKMP7 holstered on their left thighs. Boxers also dangled a Mossberg twelve-gauge with a breaching barrel under his arm. No suppressor there, just a big bang.

  With their four-tube night vision, the night had become day. Jonathan tied his gear in tight to limit any rattle, and then he was ready to go. “You all set?”

  “Born ready,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan turned a knob on his radio and said, “Mother Hen, Scorpion. We’re going hot and we’re on VOX.”

  “I copy,” she said. “Do a good job.”

  Jonathan smiled at that. He’d scolded her once for wishing them good luck when they were stepping out on an op because, as he said, luck was a thing to be managed, not victimized by. Since then, she’d been struggling to find the right phrase. For Jonathan, do a good job was just fine.

  When they arrived at the fence, Jonathan understood why people had missed the presence of the hole. It had been wired up that well.

  “Think there’s a little OCD in young LeBron?” Boxers whispered. It took less than two minutes to undo the patch and lift the section away.

  Jonathan assessed the size of the opening. “You’d better be careful, Big Guy. Turns out you’re bigger than their truck.” He pulled an infrared chem light from a side pouch on his ruck, snapped it, shook it to bring it to life, and then dropped it on the ground to mark the makeshift gate. Chances were good that there’d be a lot more activity swirling around them on the way out than there was on the way in. He didn’t want to be feeling their way along the fence in the dark, looking for the back door.

  They approached the black side of the building as a single shadow gliding through the dark, moving slowly and deliberately so as not to make unnecessary noise. Jonathan scanned continuously left to right walking forward, while Boxers moved in the same direction walking backward, scanning their six o’clock for bad guys.

  “Contact at twelve o’clock,” Jonathan whispered. The two guards stood at their stations, flanking the back door. The embers of their cigarettes flared in his NVGs. “MP7,” he said.

  The 4.6 millimeter round from the MP7 was a devastating bullet when shot well. Barely wider than a BB, it left the muzzle at over 2,400 feet per second, but because it was so small, it made far less noise than the larger, faster 5.56 millimeter round from his M27. With the suppressor in place, there was no discernible muzzle flash, and the noise was less than that of a ladyfinger firecracker. Jonathan didn’t know how Heckler and Koch continued to get it so right every time in the manufacture of weapons.

  All of the team’s long guns and MP7s were fitted with infrared laser sights that cast a beam through the dark that only they could see, thanks to their NVGs. In Jonathan’s world, fair fights were for losers. “I’m right, you’re left,” he said.

  “Roger.”

  “On zero,” Jonathan said, as he settled his laser on his target’s forehead. “Three, two, one . . .” He didn’t bother to say the word because it was the cadence that counted. Their weapons fired in unison, and their targets dropped in unison, their bodies unplugged from their brains. “Two for two sleeping,” Jonathan said for Venice’s benefit.

  They resumed their fore-and-aft advancing configuration as they closed the distance to the rear wall. Jonathan didn’t bother to check the guards for pulses. The spatter told him everything he needed to know. “Okay, Big Guy. You’re up.”

  Jonathan pivoted to cover the rear—their only exposed side, now that they were up against the building—while Boxers wrapped a loop of detonating cord around the electrical box serving the freezer unit inside. Detonating cord was every operator’s best friend. Essentially a tube of PETN—an explosive with a detonation velocity that exceeded twenty thousand feet per second—a coil or two could drop a hundred-year-old oak. Just an inch or two would make ridiculously quick work of an electrical cable. While Big Guy did his thing, Jonathan holstered the MP7 and brought his M27 to his shoulder and continually scanned left to right and back again, one-eighty to one-eighty.

  Thirty seconds later, he heard Big Guy’s voice in his ear. “Done. Redundant electronic fuse set on zero then a hundred milliseconds.” When the stakes were high, redundancy reigned as king. In this case, Boxers’ first detonator would blow the instant he pushed the button on his controller. If it malfunctioned, then the backup would initiate one tenth of a second later.

  “Ready to advance?” Jonathan asked. He fought the urge to look at Boxers because Big Guy posed no threat. At this stage, all he cared about were threats.

  “Ready to advance.”

  “Advancing to Red.” In recent years, the special operations community had moved away from the color-coded sides, but it was in Jonathan’s DNA. White was front, black was back, and red was right. Compass points were far more precise, but who had a compass on them all the time?

  They reassumed the same back-to-back posture as they approached the rear side, Jonathan leading and Boxers following. As they approached the end of the back wall, Jonathan said, “Corner.”

  That expanded Boxers’ area of responsibility to a 270-degree radius as Jonathan concentrated on the threat that lay directly around the turn.

  “Advancing right,” Jonathan said, and he turned the corner. His senses told him that there had to be guards here. It didn’t make sense otherwise. Why put sentries on some doors yet not on others? Since the loading dock was elevated, and the doors inset, it was difficult to get a line of sight. Advancing blind now, he moved much more slowly than before.

  He heard voices from up on the deck. He didn’t understand the language, but they seemed to be chatting, unaware of danger. Jonathan eased away from the wall for a better look. He whispered. “I’ve got two more targets.”

  They were standing next to each other, which to Jonathan’s perspective put them in the same plane.

  “I’ve got a bad angle,” Jonathan said. “Swing out and tell me what you see.”

  He felt Boxers pivot, swinging his rifle in a horizontal arc over his head. “I’ve got a left target if you want me to take it,” he said. “That would be the farthest from you.”

  “On zero, then,” Jonathan said. He counted the cadence again, with the same result, except this time, because of the oblique angle and the backlight, he saw the aura of simultaneous brain-sprays. Both targets were neutralized. Jonathan had lost count over the years of the number of lives he’d taken, but it never got easier. To point a gun at Jonathan was a capital offense that that earned the perpetrator a guilt-free execution. But to die standing sentry—the most basic of soldierly duties—bore no honor or fanfare. In dispatching those, he always felt a burden of sadness. Nothing he couldn’t handle, but a sadness nonetheless.

  With the lifeless bodies collapsed on the deck, Jonathan and Boxers moved together up the steps to the loading dock, where Boxers affixed the second charge of det cord to the electrical service. While he did that, Jonathan moved to the personnel door next to the roll-up overhead to see if it was unlocked. It was not. “I’m going to set a breaching charge,” he said. That meant pressing a GPC—a general purpose charge, which consisted of a wad of C4 high explo
sive triggered by a tail of det cord—into a three-inch trail where the door lock met the jamb. Typically, Jonathan preferred old-fashioned fuse (OFF) for the GPC, but to stay in concert with the charges Boxers had already set, he inserted dual electronic initiators into the detonating cord.

  Jonathan asked, “Are you—”

  An agonized scream ruined the night.

  Teddy might have been on rails, he glided so quickly across the room, the short sledgehammer raised. His eyes were focused and hot. He seemed unaware of anything or anyone but Graham, who remained frozen in place. Teddy was still moving when he swung the sledge like a baseball bat.

  Graham closed his eyes as the head of the hammer shattered his left elbow. The jolt of agony somehow unplugged his nervous system and he collapsed in a heap onto the icy tile.

  “Remember,” Teddy said. “This is your deal. This is what you asked for.” With that, he launched a kick to Graham’s belly. As he doubled up on his side, another kick nailed him in the kidney.

  Someone was screaming.

  He’d just realized that the screams were his own when the building shook with an explosion and blackness fell.

  The splintered jamb was still burning when Jonathan and Boxers squirted through the door. As was their tradition, Jonathan went in first and swept low and right while Boxers swept high and left. Their IR laser sights drew crisscrossing lines through the lingering smoke of the explosions.

  The smoke confused the NVGs, potentially obscuring targets behind a veil of heated gases.

  Jonathan and Boxers moved as one, in a crouch, their weapons at the ready and pressed against their shoulders. As their ears recovered from the concussion of the blasts—hearing protection could protect only so much—they heard the sounds of confused bedlam. Shouting voices combined with more howls of agony. Most of the shouting was in the same dialect that he’d heard from the guards.

  “The noise is coming from two o’clock,” Boxers said.