GrayNet

by D S Kane

  “I’ve waited this long. Another day or two—”

  “Good then. Wing out.”

  She sat holding the phone. Be patient, she told herself. There is a great story here. O’Toole went to the kitchen and got herself a glass of Cima Collina Chardonnay. Finally, she’d have the cooperation of one of the principals as an interviewee. She looked out the window, wondering how much Sashakovich really knew.

  * * *

  Cassie followed Houmaz’s location as it moved north through Boston. In thirty minutes he’d arrived at a warehouse in Boston harbor, about three hundred feet from the sub. She called out, “Avram! Are we set up yet?”

  The bus slowed as it neared the wharf. Cassie pulled the costume from her go bag. She stripped to her underwear and donned a Kevlar vest, then placed padding over it on her belly using duct tape. She drew a tattered old black dress over her head and pulled it down. With the gray wig on her head she now looked like an obese old woman with stringy hair.

  The bus pulled to a stop on the street, just outside the entrance to the wharf. Cassie was the last to exit, trying to decide whether or not to take the walking stick with her. Its handle had a concealed button at its top, and pressing it would cause the cane to fire a single .22 caliber bullet. Fifty-two well-equipped mercs were her companions. The stick offered her no additional protection and she left it on the bus.

  She moved within the hoard of soldiers and took cover with them around the wharf’s point of entry. The sub sat at the last station of this pier, docked about one hundred yards away.

  According to the cell phone trace program, Houmaz was watching the action from the warehouse in front of her, less than thirty yards away. He was on the other side of the cargo pod they used for cover from the hitters and zombie patriots.

  * * *

  Louis Stepponi rolled to the edge of the top of the cargo pod. He watched a band of mercenaries group around an old woman. The mercs carried weapons, but wore Hawaiian shirts. What the fuck? He wondered what was happening ten feet below him. The woman’s face was obscured, but the last time he’d seen mercenaries, they’d decimated his competitors in Maui. He knew it would be dangerous to kill the woman. And, what if she wasn’t Sashakovich? He’d never get away alive. Sounds from the harbor machinery, the waves splashing against the wharf’s pylons, and noise from the busy city street behind them all obscured his ability to hear any trace of them. Stepponi decided to wait and watch as things developed. He could always terminate her if he could confirm she was his target.

  * * *

  Cassie watched thousands of zombie patriots and assassins crowd together, with a small buffer space of one hundred feet to the sub. She noted that some of the zombie patriots held weapons, and a few held meat cleavers and wooden boxes. She shivered.

  Shimmel had told her that yesterday, before they left the sub and set foot on the pier, triggering the legitimacy of their plea for “sanctuary” in America, the sailors had placed C-6 explosives throughout the sub. One of them had later donned scuba gear, left via a torpedo tube and placed enough C-6 under the wharf’s pylons to blow up the pier. The sub was empty now, all the sailors gone using the torpedo tubes to exit to the beach. They were now at hotels, waiting for the next part of their mission to end.

  Cassie asked Shimmel, “Are we ready?”

  “Yes, Sashakovich. First, we will visit the warehouse where Houmaz hides, and then attend to the army on the wharf.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay, then. Let’s be about it.” But when she moved toward the warehouse door, he touched her shoulder and shook his head.

  PART IV

  +

  CHAPTER 41

  November 8, 4:46 p.m.

  Pier 2, Boston Harbor,

  Massachusetts

  Shimmel gripped her sleeve. “You cannot go. I promised Lee, and he’s right. We have professional soldiers, whose training gears them for battle.”

  She frowned, but took a step back as she watched the action.

  * * *

  Forty-two mercenaries stood at the ready outside the warehouse on Pier 2 at Boston Harbor. Another ten mercs waited in reserve, standing ready by the bus just in case any of the zombie patriots tried to flee during the planned battle. Major McTavish said, “Captain Sambol, go in first. If Houmaz catches on to us before we have him cornered, speak in Arabic. Tell him that all you want is for him to surrender. We’ll treat him well. Be quiet, be careful.”

  Halid Sambol replied, “Yes sir,” and silently opened the warehouse door. He slipped inside. Sambol turned on his night vision goggles. He pressed the Send function at the throat of his uniform and whispered into the microphone. “I’m in, fifteen feet on the left side. Seems quiet and clear. Send in Lieutenant Harrington and have him go right twenty feet to the hoist near the wall.”

  The door opened again and closed as silently, as Henry Harrington moved in to take cover behind the hoist. One by one the others came in, until twenty-two men and women were spread out on the warehouse’s ground floor. All wore night vision goggles and some had the device turned on. Houmaz wasn’t on the ground floor.

  At McTavish’s direction, Sambol padded up the steps to the mezzanine balcony, followed by Lisa Orley, who found cover behind a copier. She motioned to Sambol that she was in place and half the team began following them. The others remained on the bottom floor.

  Lisa had missed killing Houmaz once when Schmidt’s Medi-Jector failed. This time her only technology was a Ruger Mini-14. Nearly foolproof. The barrels of this version of the Mini weren’t rifled, sending shots flipping end over end instead of spinning. Instead of boring through flesh and bone, they ripped into flesh, traveling up any bone they hit, until hitting another bone. The damage these modified guns could do was extensive, but their accuracy suffered at longer distances. The gun was also altered to feed rounds into the chamber at up to a hundred per minute, making up for accuracy issues.

  Lisa looked around for her quarry, wanting so much to be the one who snuffed Houmaz that she felt heat rush up her core, inside her STF-enhanced Hawaiian shirt. She could almost taste his death, like a finely prepared gourmet meal.

  * * *

  Cassie and Shimmel stood together among the ten mercs who remained just outside the door to the warehouse. She looked back to the mercs stationed at the bus and then to the warehouse door in front of her. She smacked her lips, eager to join those hunting Houmaz.

  Seeing her expression, Shimmel shook his head. “No. We already discussed this. Let your mercs do the job you pay them for. Be patient.”

  She could feel her frustration nearing the boiling point. She feared for their lives, and could fully feel the guilt she’d already suffered. Guilt for other battles where her troops had fought and died on her behalf.

  It soured her mind.

  * * *

  Achmed Houmaz crouched by the grimy warehouse window, looking at the sub. He focused on the activity there and a smile crept over his face. He thought, father, brothers, your revenge is at hand. Soon you can rest in peace. He felt grounded in his spiritual beliefs, as twisted as he knew they’d recently become.

  When he heard the quiet scuffling, at first he thought it came from wharf rats. But the sounds came systematically. Rats didn’t behave like that. Unless the rats were human. He began to search for the locations from where the sounds came, and saw dark uniforms crouched and moving in a coordinated fashion through the darkened top floor of the warehouse. He couldn’t count them all. Too many for him to think that they meant him anything but death. Houmaz looked around him in panic.

  He hadn’t thought about an escape route before, because he’d had no reason to think he’d need one. He didn’t fear death, but he wanted to live long enough to see Sashakovich’s head cut from her body. Now, he’d have to move, to live long enough to achieve his goal.

  He searched for an exit. His enemies were at the staircase. The only way out was the window in front of him. Houmaz gulped looking down. Twenty feet, at least. He saw two fig
ures standing right in front of the doorway leading into this warehouse. He couldn’t make out the faces; dusk cast the world into gray tones with no sunset to light his view.

  His best chance of escape was to jump and set down right between them. Two enemies would be difficult but as many as came toward him right now meant imminent death. He’d aim and shoot at one of them as he jumped. If he was lucky, he might be able to kill the other as he landed.

  He chambered a bullet in the Beretta and moved two steps back, away from the window. He crouched, preparing to jump. As he rose, Lisa Orley spotted him and took aim.

  * * *

  William Wing liked to sing while he worked. He knew it disturbed Sylvia to listen to him warbling off-key, but she stood and watched anyway, staring at the screens flying across the monitor. He was humming “Cross Road Blues,” a Robert Johnson song from the mid-1930s.

  Suddenly he stopped to check his work. He looked right in front of him, speaking to no one. “Almost done now, you bastard. What mercs couldn’t do, I alone can! I’m CryptoMonger! Hope you like Wahhabi cooking, asshole.”

  CHAPTER 42

  November 8, 5:38 p.m.

  Pier 2, Boston Harbor,

  Massachusetts

  In the gray light, a pout covered Cassie’s mouth. “Well I still don’t like asking others to risk their lives while I stand here in safety. It’s not—”

  She heard a Ruger’s characteristic thumping, followed by the crash of window glass twenty feet above. She looked up. The setting sun at last peeked rosy through a slit in the clouds, lighting them all. Glass splinters fell like rain, along with a rotund man holding a handgun. Shimmel and Cassie both covered their heads against the falling glass slivers, to keep shattered fragments from hitting their faces.

  They dived away as fast as their legs could spring them.

  Homaz dropped right between them, less than five feet away from her. Shimmel’s dive put him on the wood planking five feet behind Houmaz. As Avram fell, he aimed his Ruger Mini-14.

  Cassie saw Houmaz aim as he dropped. At her head.

  Underneath her disguise, her moving body was covered in a liquid armor Hawaiian shirt. Her head was unprotected. Houmaz’s aim was bad. The bullet hit her obliquely in the shoulder, but the bulletproof shirt ricocheted the shell up her armored chest. The bullet slammed through her tilted head, butchering her right cheek, and plowing through the other side of her face to exit near her ear. She landed in a heap, unmoving, unfeeling, in shock.

  * * *

  Shimmel saw it all happen out of the corners of his vision as he fell—Houmaz firing at Sashakovich and Cassie hitting the ground amid a spreading puddle of her blood, pooling around her shattered head. Without thinking, Shimmel rolled, rose up again, and reacted, aiming his modified semi-automatic Ruger and firing a single shot that ripped the Arab’s arm off at the shoulder.

  Houmaz’s Beretta fell to the floor, still gripped by the severed arm. His face contorted and he screamed in Arabic, surrounded by mercs at the warehouse entrance who suddenly noticed him. A river of blood poured from his armless shoulder. The mercs guns pointed at his head. Shimmel came close and examined Houmaz’s shoulder. There was no way to staunch the bleeding from so big a wound. He would surely die. And there was another wound that had blown out a piece of his hip, possibly just as he was starting to jump through the window.

  Shimmel ran to Cassie as he screamed, “Medic!” He examined her head. There was a small hole in the cheek on her right side at the bullet’s point of entry, and a large chunk missing on the left side of her face where the bullet had exited, a fragment of it ripping out flesh just to the right of her carotid artery.

  Cassie turned her head and looked into Shimmel’s eyes. Her eyes blinked fast. He could tell that she was falling into shock. Her breathing grew ragged. Her words were a slurred whisper. “Am I gonna die?”

  “Be quiet and focus on staying conscious. Let’s hope that you are still lucky. Don’t move. Stay conscious. Think of your family.” He could clearly see the massive damage to her head. He knew if she did survive, the bullet’s passage would require extensive, multiple surgeries.

  Avram Shimmel knelt and bowed his head.

  He prayed for Cassie.

  CHAPTER 43

  November 8, 6:11 p.m.

  Pier 2, Boston Harbor,

  Massachusetts

  Dr. Phillip Gorman put his case down and began examining her wound. Shimmel asked him, “Doctor, what’s her situation? Will she live?”

  “Uh, hard to tell.” He spoke as he examined her. “There will be damage to your skull from the bullet’s passage and exit. What’s left of your cheekbone looks real bad. Don’t move while I look. Now, open your jaw.” She couldn’t. He began to remove supplies; a roll of gauze, a needle and surgical thread. And then a syringe and a vial. Cassie watched Gorman intently, trying to keep her eyes from closing. No use, they were closing. She tried to will them to stay open but they closed anyway and she drifted into a nightmare of her life, made more threatening than any of her dreams. Caskets and death, so much death clouded her mind. She tried to scream but no sound came from her.

  A gray decaying fleshy finger touched the hole in her face and bare bone hands gripped her face. Icy lips touched hers in a death kiss. She struggled to turn away. The bony head emitted a laugh that froze her to the marrow.

  * * *

  Clouds obscured the sun once more. Louis Stepponi heard the gunshots and scanned the area of the nearby warehouse to see what had happened. In the gray dim light, he saw two bodies down. A troop of armed, uniformed men quickly surround the bodies. All of this happened directly below him. He couldn’t tell who or what, but he began to think about the scene. It wasn’t safe here. Then something else drew his attention, down near where the sub lay moored to the dock. He turned back to watch that action.

  A few hundred yards down the pier, a mob of zombie patriots and assassins also looked to see what was going on. At the rear of the group, as far from the sub as possible, a man shouted and waved his arms. A burgundy Boston University hoodie sweatshirt covered his head, obscuring his face.

  Alister McTavish pointed to the sub, jumping up and down, screaming, “That’s her! I just saw her! That’s Sashakovich!”

  Stepponi looked at the sub, focusing as fast as he could through his infrared scope. He saw no one on the con and no one at the base of the con. Louis was confused.

  All the zombie patriots and assassins grouped in front of him looked, and some pointed to the end of the pier. They all began running as fast as they could toward the sub.

  * * *

  First to reach the sub was Harry Aimes. He sprinted from the dock onto the sub’s deck as fast as he could, climbing up the conning tower’s ladder, breathless. And then he stumbled as he dropped through the con. He fell into darkness. Aimes grunted as he hit the floor of the bridge. One of his legs cracked loudly as its bone snapped. He tried to rise, but the pain was too severe.

  And then others began to flood down the ladder into the sub, crushing him. At first he felt jabs from feet, flattening the bones in his hands, kicks as the others stumbled into him, but then someone tripped over him and their knee crushed his throat. He tried to gasp, but no breath came.

  Now there were two of them flat on the floor, being hit with a stampede of feet in the dark, and bodies continued tripping one another. Dying bodies, crushed and dead, piled atop each other, and yet more forced their way down the con’s ladder.

  The individual pains shearing through Aimes kept growing and merging as the darkness of death clouded, and then flooded his mind until it snapped, like a slamming door.

  * * *

  Shimmel watched the press of bodies forcing themselves toward and into the sub. They pushed against each other to the point of crushing those who fell to death on the pier in front of the sub. Shimmel watched, still shook by Cassie’s fate. He hated the men responsible for carrying out Houmaz’s will. He shook his head at the spectacle. “Time to end this,”
he grumbled. “Jacques, send them all to Hell.”

  Major LeFleur nodded and pressed the detonator’s trigger. The explosion of the scuttling charges ignited the huge chunk of C-6 they had packed into the sub’s ready room. The sub snapped in half and disappeared in a flash of light, along with two hundred feet of the pier, packed with C-6 at strategic locations. All that remained were the pylons, now smoking. Avram stood ten feet from the edge of what remained of the smoking pier. He turned and ran back to Gorman.

  * * *

  At the entrance to the pier where Gorman tended Cassie’s limp body, the mercs stood, watching as the end of the wharf burned and fell into the sea. The pod on which Louis Stepponi had positioned himself sat at the edge of the demolished section of pier. The pod caught fire and slipped toward the ocean. He sniffed the air, saw the smoke. He thought about escape. What had started out as the probability of easy money now looked like the possibility of early death.

  He looked around and saw flames licking the top of the pod, getting closer. No way down. He rode the flaming pod into the ocean.

  There had to be easier ways to make a living, he thought.

  Stepponi dropped the rifle into the harbor, then took a deep breath, and swam toward the shoreline.

  * * *

  Gault stood at the edge of the wharf, holding binoculars against his eyes. The cell phone he’d mounted on the tripod next to him continued taking an MP4 movie of the event.

  Why does Greenfield need a recording of Sashakovich’s death? He remembered meeting her when she worked at the agency. She’d been physically awkward, too thin and too ungainly to be attractive. As he watched he saw the stretcher carrying a body with a head wound. He recognized her face, or what was left of it. There was no sheet over her body, but blood pooled on the stretcher. His jaw fell open. It was her. Someone had actually done it. Given that wound, if she wasn’t yet dead, she surely would be soon. He pointed the cell phone at her and let the recording roll on. Might as well report in. Possibly salvage my career. He dialed Greenfield on his cell phone. “Sir, I saw her body at the pier. She’d dead. No doubt about it. I’m sending you an MP4.”