by Alex Lukeman
"I like it," Lamont said. "No razor wire."
CHAPTER 47
They flew to Sacramento on the Gulfstream. Their weapons and gear were stashed in two large aluminum cases. Nick rented a GMC Suburban at the airport. They headed north on Interstate 5 and turned west on Highway 20. They stopped for something to eat at a small town by a lake. The last part of the trip took them along a scenic, winding road that twisted its way through a forest of cedars and redwoods before ending at the coast in Fort Bragg.
They rented rooms in a motel overlooking the ocean. Aside from a view of the Pacific, it didn't offer much more than a bed, a bathroom, satellite TV, and continental breakfast in the morning.
They didn't need more. They weren't there to look at the whales.
Nick spread out blueprints of Haltman's house on the bed. Lamont looked at the plan.
"Lot of rooms."
"Standard procedure," Nick said. "We clear a room, we leave it behind, we assume it doesn't stay clear after that."
"At least they're big rooms," Ronnie said. "Gives us more space to move around."
"If anyone is awake and paying attention, they'll see us as soon as we land on the patio," Lamont said.
"We'll hit them at three in the morning," Nick said. "Haltman will probably be asleep in this room here."
He tapped the plan where it was marked as the master bedroom.
"He's got cancer," Selena said. "You can't count on him being asleep."
"Freddie said he'd be waiting for us." Ronnie rubbed his nose. "You think he's that smart? That he knows we'll be coming for him?"
"Yeah, I think he's that smart," Nick said. "Besides that, he's got nothing left to lose. Makes him dangerous."
Lamont began whistling Bobby McGee.
"Lamont…"
"Sorry, Nick." He grinned.
"Let's assume he's waiting," Nick said. "It doesn't matter. We have an advantage because he doesn't know that we think he's ready for us. He'll have told his security to be on the lookout. It's reasonable to assume they'll expect us to come through the grounds."
"That doesn't mean he won't have somebody watching the back," Ronnie said.
Nick nodded. "If there is, we should be able to spot him as we come in. No one's going to hear us coming. We can take him from above before he sounds an alarm."
"Those big glass doors on the patio have to be alarmed," Lamont said. "As soon as we open them, all hell is likely to break loose."
"There's no help for that. We shoot anybody that shows up."
"What about domestic help?" Selena asked. "There could be someone there. A cook or a nurse, someone who isn't a combatant."
"Then we identify and move on," Nick said. "It shouldn't be a problem."
For the next two hours they studied the plans and went over problems that might arise, working through every scenario they could think of. They'd all been there too many times to assume everything would go smoothly. It was best to plan for Murphy's Law: if something could go wrong, it would. All the planning and visualizing had to be done, but in the end anything could happen once the shooting started.
They spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning weapons and rechecking gear. Lamont, Ronnie and Nick spent extra time with the military skydiving chutes they'd use to glide in on the target. Hood had provided a plane and CIA pilot for them. It was waiting at the local airport.
Nobody felt hungry. The rooms had a snack rack with crackers, bottles of water and candy. It was all they needed.
At 0100 they left the motel. The air was wet with mist rolling in from the ocean.
"This turns into fog, it could be a problem," Ronnie said.
"Visibility's still okay," Nick said.
"Yeah, but for how long?"
"Fog could work to our advantage."
"Not if we can't see the house when we jump."
"The GPS will handle that."
The private airport was about two miles from town. Arrangements had been made with the owner for the flight. About a dozen small planes were parked on an apron near a single, green-roofed hangar. A windsock flapped erratically from a tall pole. There was no tower.
Light spilled out onto the apron from the open hangar door. Their plane was inside, a Cessna 208 Caravan. Nick drove the Suburban into the hangar and shut it down The pilot was walking around the plane, making a last-minute check. He eyed the lethal gear and chutes they were carrying
"You must be Carter," he said. "I'm Eddie."
He didn't say his last name. He held out his hand and Nick shook it.
A large rollup door on the side of the plane's fuselage was open. They stowed their gear inside. Nick handed the keys of the suburban to Selena.
"Drive to Haltman's and go past it, then kill your lights. Come back and park near the drive leading in from the highway. Once we're done, we'll exfil along the drive and through the gates. Wait for us."
"What if there's trouble?"
"Then I'll let you know. Don't get yourself killed playing Wonder Woman, all right? We can handle whatever they've got."
Eddie the pilot was looking impatient.
"You'd better get going," Nick said. He kissed her. "I'll see you in a couple of hours."
"You'd better," Selena said.
She put the Suburban in gear and drove off into the night.
CHAPTER 48
Gregory Haltman leaned back in his chair and studied a row of a dozen monitors showing different views of his estate. The monitors were there for his own personal satisfaction. Security was the job of the men he hired to protect him. In the building next to the garage, a complete monitoring station was manned twenty-four hours a day. But Haltman liked to keep his finger on things.
He wouldn't be doing that for much longer. The latest laboratory report from the hospital lay crumpled in a wastebasket near his chair. The numbers were all going in the wrong direction. With luck, he might have another four or five months. Maybe six.
It was ironic. He was one of the richest men in America, yet all his billions could not buy him more time. All they could buy was an array of drugs which gave him pain relief and provided an illusion of energy. Not long before, he'd taken two of the designer pills that boosted his alertness and woke up his body. Combined with the narcotics that kept the pain bearable, they produced a crackling high.
Gregory Haltman's mind was like a pinball machine on steroids.
He watched the monitors. Intermittent fog drifted over the grounds, sometimes blurring the view from the cameras, sometimes clearing.
One of the guards walked across the front of the house, accompanied by a dog. Haltman didn't trust the high strung dogs. They were never allowed inside his home. They were there to serve a purpose, nothing more.
The men who had killed his brother were coming, he was certain of it. Perhaps not all of them, but that was of little importance. If there were others, they would die in the nuclear holocaust he still hoped to unleash. Perhaps they would come tonight. Perhaps it would be tomorrow or the next day. It didn't matter. He was waiting for them. His security was on high alert.
They couldn't get to the house from the back unless they were human flies, able to climb the cliff. But the cliff was protected, as much by nature as by the hidden booby-traps strung below the patio edge. No, they had to come through the grounds.
He'd given orders to take at least one of them alive. He wanted to confront them, to make sure they knew they were responsible for the destruction that was about to happen. Things could still go wrong. It was still possible that war might not start. But at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing his brother's murderers had paid.
In the unlikely event his enemies somehow got past all the security, they would find him in this room. They'd be confident, seeing just an old, dying man, sitting in a chair. But he had a surprise in store for them, if it came to that.
Haltman's mind was a jumble of thoughts and images. He stood and winced with pain, then walked over to a desk and picked up a picture of
Carissa.
Things could have been different, he thought. If you'd lived. If that animal hadn't taken you.
He held the picture up to his forehead for a moment, remembering, then set it back on the desk. The window coverings used to block the daytime sun were open. Outside, the wet stones of the patio glistened under the landscaping lights.
He decided he needed a drink. The doctors had warned him about mixing alcohol with the powerful cocktail of drugs he consumed every day. Well, the doctors had said a lot of things. Everything except what he wanted to hear, that a cure had been discovered or a new drug that would delay the inevitable.
Haltman went to a tall liquor cabinet in the corner of the room. He took out a bottle of cognac distilled from grapes grown on a sunlit hillside in France during the nineteenth century. It was the only bottle left in existence of that particular year and lineage. There didn't seem to be much point in letting it get any older. He broke open the wax seal and extracted the cork. He took a large, crystal snifter from the cabinet, filled it half full with the liquor, and returned to his chair.
He reached for another pill and swallowed it with some of the cognac. Somewhere at the edge of his jangled awareness, he heard the sound of a plane passing in the night.
CHAPTER 49
Nick, Lamont and Ronnie waited in the back of the plane. It had plenty of room. The Cessna was big enough to carry eight or nine passengers in addition to the pilot. This one had been modified for skydiving with the rollup door.
Nick activated his microphone.
"Selena, you copy?"
"You're five by five, Nick."
"Where are you?"
"I just passed Haltman's place. I'm about to turn around and head back."
"We're coming up on the drop zone any moment now."
"The fog is getting thicker," Selena said. "Be careful."
The voice of the pilot came over the comm link. "Two minutes."
"See you soon," Nick said. "Out."
Lamont pulled open the rollup door. Nick and Ronnie lined up behind him. The cabin filled with the noise of the engine and the air rushing by.
"Go in five," the pilot said over the comm link. "Four. Three. Two. One."
Lamont dove out of the open door, followed by Nick and Ronnie. The slipstream buffeted them, then was gone as the Cessna disappeared into the night.
They popped chutes and steered for the target.
Below, the white froth of the ocean broke in a ragged line against the rocky coast. The pilot had done a good job. Haltman's house was below them in the mists, outlined by landscaping lights. The patio where they would land was visible through the shifting fog.
A gust of wind tried to send Nick into the swimming pool. He steered clear and came down hard near the diving board. His ankle twisted under him as he struck the stones. Pain shot up his leg and into his lower back. He rolled, released the chute and stood, testing the ankle. It hurt, but he could walk on it. As long as he kept moving, it would be okay. He could feel the muscles in his back trying to lock up. It had given him trouble since a bad landing in Tibet.
They'd landed at one end of the house. They ran to a set of glass doors opening onto the patio. A single light shone inside the room. Nick guessed it was a guest bedroom. He slid the door open on quiet rollers and they stepped inside. No one was inside the room.
Lamont spoke in a quiet voice. "That was easy."
"Yeah," Nick said. "Maybe too easy. Remember what Freddie said."
In the room at the other end of the house, where Haltman was sipping from his crystal snifter, a red light began blinking on the wall over the monitors.
Haltman picked up a handheld radio and spoke into it. "They're here. The blue bedroom."
Two clicks sounded an acknowledgment.
Ronnie waited by the door of the bedroom, his hand on the knob. Nick nodded and Ronnie pulled the door open.
The bedroom was at the end of a hall leading away to the right, toward the rest of the house. Across the hall another door opened to a second bedroom. Lamont crouched down and covered the hall. Nick and Ronnie slipped across and into the bedroom.
"Clear," Nick said.
He came out of the room. The hall was spacious, with a high ceiling. It was ten feet wide, carpeted from wall-to-wall with thick pile and lined with expensive paintings in carved, gold frames. The only light came from lamps hung over the art.
Nick looked down the hall.
It's a shooting gallery. If I remember the plans right, this opens out into the main living area.
He signaled with his hand. They moved toward the living room. Ronnie heard a sound and glanced back, his MP-7 up at his shoulder. One of Haltman's guards stepped out of the bedroom they'd used to enter the house. Ronnie opened fire, a three round burst that caught the careless guard full in the chest. He fell back into the room.
Two men appeared at the other end of the hall. Nick and Lamont dropped down and opened up as the men fired.
The noise from the guards' guns drowned out the coughing stutter of the MP-7s. Two of the paintings blew from the wall. The frames shattered, sending a cloud of splinters through the air. Bullets gouged into the walls on either side. The two guards went down under the hail of bullets Nick and Lamont sent toward them.
"That's torn it," Nick said. "Move. Haltman's in here somewhere."
Selena heard everything over the comm link as she waited in the Suburban.
They ran into the main living area. Couches, chairs and end tables were scattered about the room. A light shone on a large oil painting hung over a mission style sideboard. A wall of windows twelve feet high faced out toward the back and the patio.
"Outside," Ronnie yelled.
Four more men were sprinting across the flagstones. Nick, Ronnie and Lamont turned as one toward the patio and fired. The windows exploded in a cascade of falling glass. The noise was intense, a strange symphony of breaking glass, the chatter of the guns, and shots and cries coming from the men outside. The couch next to Nick exploded in a cloud of stuffing as bullets ripped into it.
Lamont cried out and went down. A cold wind blew in through the shattered windows, bringing tendrils of fog and the salt odor of the ocean, mixed with the pungent smell of burnt powder.
One of the men on the patio was twisting on the ground in pain. Nick put two more rounds into him. He stopped moving.
Nick swiveled to cover Ronnie, bending over Lamont.
"I'm okay." Lamont took a painful breath and looked down at a hole in his shirt. "Sucker hit the armor."
"Take two aspirin and call me in the morning," Ronnie said.
He helped Lamont to his feet.
"We'll keep going," Nick said.
They passed a formal dining room with a long, polished table and entered another hallway leading toward the far end of the house.
The next room was the kitchen. Nick got down on one knee and glanced around the corner. A prepping island and grill took up the middle of the large room. Shining, copper bottomed pots and pans hung from a rack above it.
He ducked back as bullets splintered the frame of the door.
Ronnie reached down, drew out a grenade and lobbed it through the door. The explosion ripped the fancy cookware from the ceiling and sent shrapnel flying into the high-end appliances scattered about the room. Nick looked around the corner again. No more shots came from within.
They moved past two more empty rooms toward the end of the house, where it formed a right angled L at the end of the patio. Light came from around the corner. Music came from somewhere ahead. Someone was humming along with it.
Nick looked around the corner into a large room that took up the entire end of the house. A rack of computer monitors lined a wide shelf on the far wall, displaying images of the grounds. Someone was seated in a large, leather chair, his back turned toward the entrance. He had a glass in one hand. The other was moving in time to the music.
Then Nick realized he was looking at an image of himself looking around the
corner on one of the monitors.
"I wouldn't advise coming any closer," Haltman said.
He swiveled his chair around.
"Why don't you all come out where I can see you?"
Nick and the others stepped out. Lamont watched the hall for more trouble.
"Let's see," Haltman said. "You're Carter, aren't you? And that brown looking man with the big nose must be the Indian."
Ronnie raised his weapon and stepped forward.
"You really shouldn't take another step, you know. Allow me to show you why."
Haltman set his drink down and picked up a piece of paper. He held it up to show them it was only paper, nothing more. He crumpled it into a ball.
"Watch carefully," he said.
He touched a button on the arm of his chair. Instantly, the opening filled with narrow, crisscrossing beams of red light.
He tossed the ball toward them. Just before it reached them, it burst into flame. The ashes dropped to the floor.
"Lasers," Haltman said. "My own design. Effective, don't you think?"
"Give it up, Haltman," Nick said. "There's nowhere for you to go."
"Nowhere for you, either."
"Nick," Lamont said. He gestured with his rifle.
Ten feet down the hall they'd just passed through, a second grid of red laser beams blocked their return. They were trapped.
"Do I have your attention?" Haltman asked.
"What do you want, Haltman? You know it ends here."
"Want?" Haltman's eyes were wild. "There's nothing I want from you except to watch you die. Like you watched my brother."
He giggled.
"Asshole is stoned," Lamont muttered under his breath.
"Your brother was a traitor and a murderer," Nick said. "He got what he deserved."
"Yes, you would say that, wouldn't you?"
Haltman picked up what might have been a television remote control, except it was larger and seemed to have more buttons than normal.
