Overwatch

by Riley Flynn

  For the next little while, the four children were able to forget that the world had ended, and that they had lost their parents, and that real fun was hard to find, and that grown-ups seemed to be either too serious or drunk these days. They reveled in their little igloo and each other’s company, and they had the best time that any of them could remember.

  They had no idea their evening of fun would end far too soon, but not before it had become a nightmare.

  26

  The ride to the resort had been filled with stunned silence. Jax hadn’t even argued when Todd insisted on coming along; he simply stared into the night as he piloted the Hummer first down Lake Avenue, then right on Springmeadow Drive, past the Big Stratton Reservoir that served the HQ’s water needs, and to the resort.

  It took less than ten minutes, but to Jax it was an eternity. Henry Archer was dead. The man who had brought him up from a snot-nosed second lieutenant to be the commander of an elite company of counter-terrorists. The man who had been his rock for most of the last six months since the collapse, the one he could always rely on to help him stay sane amidst the insanity, was no more.

  Quaid met them as he pulled into the front parking lot. A dozen people milled around outside the entrance, as if doing so could somehow change the situation.

  “Sir,” said Quaid. His expression was stone but his eyes were wet.

  Jax cleared his throat. “Where’s the body?”

  “In his quarters. The president is there, sir.”

  Jax stalked toward the entrance and the crowd parted to let him through. None of them spoke. The others followed at a discreet distance, not wanting to crowd him. The general’s suite was on the main floor, at the back, with a view of the golf course. Jax had been there a dozen times over the last six months, and he found his way there without thinking.

  The door to the suite was open when he arrived, and Jax saw Colton Raines standing slump-shouldered a few feet inside, blocking his view of the floor. The omnipresent man in black—the name Tate jumped unbidden into Jax’s mind—caught sight of him and tapped the president’s shoulder.

  Raines turned to face him. The man’s face was drawn and pale, his eyes red. It made Jax think of the weight that seemed to hang on Archer’s shoulders in recent months. The burden of authority in a time when nothing made sense.

  “Jax,” said Raines, taking him by the arm. “I’m so very sorry, son.”

  He nodded absently as his eyes turned to the floor, and the body that lay there in a heap. Blood had seeped out around the old man’s bald head, soaking into the carpet and leaving a black, oblong stain. The general’s head sat at an impossible angle. Bruises the size of baseballs and the color of an old man’s shoes covered his head and upper body under his gray T-shirt.

  In short, his body looked like an older, male version of Lisa Blume’s when she was found in the Broadmoor kitchen.

  “Jesus,” Todd breathed behind him.

  “Who found him?” Jax asked.

  “I did.”

  He turned to see Cpl. Young of Echo Company with a tight look on his face.

  “Why were you here at this time of night?” asked Maggie, who had sidled up to Jax. “It’s almost 2200 hours.”

  Young glanced at the doorway where Quaid stood. Quaid nodded.

  “Sir,” said Young. “I, uh, came to tell the general that…well, we’d had a report that Sgt. Farries had been seen at the resort.”

  A moment earlier, Jax wouldn’t have believed he could feel any worse, but Young proved him wrong. The last bit of hope he’d been holding out for a different killer was gone, and the void it left behind was now an aching hole in his guts.

  Raines cleared his throat, and by doing so seemed to not only regain his composure but a whole new resolve.

  “This has gone on long enough,” he said sternly. “I know that you men have a history with Farries, but that’s no longer part of this equation. An American hero has just been brutally murdered, and goddamn it, I want his killer brought to justice! And I mean right fucking now!”

  Jax took a deep breath. “You heard the president,” he said. “We’re going to find Farries tonight and we’re going to bring him in. We do not stop until we complete our objective, is that understood?”

  “Yessir,” Quaid and Young said in unison.

  “I want every available set of boots in this resort on the ground immediately. No one rests until they get the message that Farries has been brought in. Channel nine for the search; I don’t want any unnecessary radio chatter breaking in.”

  “Mr. President,” said a voice from the hallway. “If I may?”

  They all turned toward the door to see John Smith standing there. Jax felt his jaw tighten at the sight of him. Of course he was here.

  “Go ahead, Smith,” Raines sighed.

  “Sir, I was the one who reported in about Farries.”

  Why doesn’t that surprise me? Jax thought acidly.

  “And?” said Raines.

  “I caught sight of him in the parking lot and, well, he was acting the same way he was the night of Lisa Blume’s murder. He was almost feral. Incoherent.”

  “What are you getting at?” Jax asked.

  “I just think there’s a very real risk in approaching him. I’m suggesting that maybe the order should be to eliminate rather than apprehend.”

  Jax felt his belly go cold.

  “You can shove your suggestion up your ass, Smith,” he growled. “Farries is to be brought in alive. That’s an order.”

  Raines took Jax by the arm and leaned in so their heads were almost touching.

  “Are you sure about that, son?” he whispered. “I don’t want to second-guess you in front of Smith and your men, but damn it, Jax, this has gone too far. I can’t honestly say that I won’t order a firing squad for this. Farries has crossed a line, and he has to accept the consequences.”

  “Mr. President, if we don’t give him a fair trial, we’re no better than the enemies he and I and Henry Archer fought so hard against in the Middle East. That’s not what America stood for then, and it’s not what we stand for now. Respectfully, sir.”

  Raines was silent for several moments. Then he sighed, nodding. “You’re right, Captain, of course. And I thank you for having the guts to tell me what I needed to hear. I won’t countermand your orders.”

  “Sir.” Jax turned back to his men. “My orders stand. Get moving. Tell everyone to use Channel 9 for the search; I don’t want any unnecessary radio chatter breaking in.”

  As Young and Quaid left with the president, Jax caught Maggie looking at him. Her dark eyes were unreadable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m stepping on your authority.”

  She shook her head. “On the contrary. You took command of the situation. It’s what you were born to do, and I was wrong to ever try to convince you otherwise.”

  “I need to join in the search. Can I rely on you to have my back?”

  She nodded. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “I’ll be there, too,” said Todd. Jax had all but forgotten that he’d come along. “This has to end.”

  “I doubt the president wants a member of his council prowling around in the dark in a potentially dangerous situation,” said Maggie.

  “I prefer to ask forgiveness instead of permission,” he said. “Got a spare weapon?”

  Jax handed him his own as he caught sight of something on a sideboard. It was Archer’s personal Colt 1911 A1, .45-caliber, deep gray steel with a polished wood inlay grip. The general had told him years ago that his own grandfather had carried it during the Japanese occupation following the Second World War. Archer worn it as his own personal sidearm—more for decoration than actual use—since he was first promoted to command.

  Jax picked it up and felt the weight of it, so much heaver than the Glocks and SIG Sauers that were standard in recent decades. He popped the magazine and saw it was full. Archer once told him he swapped out the old rounds for fresh ones every
year on his birthday, just in case he ever had to use it.

  He tucked it into the back of his belt and headed through the door. In the hallway, Smith reached out and grabbed him by the arm.

  Jax looked at the hand, then at Smith. “If you don’t want people to start calling you Lefty, you better move that.”

  “Look, Captain, I know we’ve had our differences, but you didn’t see Farries. For him to have done this—” He pointed through the doorway to Archer’s body. “I don’t think he’s the man you knew anymore.”

  Jax darted forward like a snake so that his nose was only inches from Smith’s. He saw the sudden fear in the man’s eyes and savored it for a moment before speaking.

  “I warned you months ago to stay out of my way,” he whispered. “I’m going to do it again, for the last time. If you do anything to interfere in this, I’ll make good on my threat. And I don’t care if Colton Raines himself is standing between us.”

  He ignored the look of disbelief on Maggie’s face as he passed her and headed down the hall toward the resort’s makeshift armory.

  27

  The resort was just a series of distant white lights from where the children were now, lying on their backs in the drift. Their snow angels were finished, and they’d turned their attention to the night sky. Hayley’s nose was running and her cheeks were raw, but she barely noticed.

  “I’m still not used to all the stars here at night,” Brooke said from her spot beside Hayley. “When we lived in New York, you couldn’t see anything except the city lights. Here it feels like there’s nobody else around for a million miles.”

  Brandon patted Lucas’s arm. “Must have been like this every night up in the mountains, hey?”

  Lucas nodded. He’d had some trouble with his snow angel coordination earlier, so he was still trying to flatten it down with some arm flapping.

  “Do you miss where you used to live?” asked Hayley.

  Lucas shook his head. She smiled and looked back up at the sky. They lay there like that for a few more minutes, listening to the sound of their own breathing in the crisp night air.

  Then came a crunching sound in the snow, and her heart suddenly thumped hard.

  “What was that?” Brandon hissed. “There’s somebody here! Aw, man, I told you we were gonna get in trouble!”

  “Shhh!” Brooke had rolled over and was crawling on her tummy like a soldier toward the top of the little hill. Once she was at the top, she turned and waved her arm for the others to join here.

  “You have to see this!” she whispered.

  Hayley and the boys followed suit and took up position on her flank as they got to the top. Barely twenty yards away, they saw what Brooke had seen: a pair of small, antlerless deer foraging in the open field under the moon.

  “I’ve never seen a real live deer before,” said Brooke.

  “Me, either,” said Hayley. She’d seen birds and monkeys and reptiles at the zoo in Stuttgart, but that was all, and they had all been in cages. And rabbits everywhere for the past six months, of course.

  Suddenly a puff of snow popped up from the ground next to Brandon. The three turned their heads to see Lucas frantically waving an arm.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Hayley.

  Lucas had moved down the hill now and was waving both arms in a circle, telling them to follow.

  “He’s freaking out,” said Brooke. “I hate when he acts weird like this.”

  “Why doesn’t he want us to look at the deer?”

  “Guys,” Brandon breathed. “Guys, don’t move.”

  “Geez,” said Brooke. “Will you two make up your minds? Lucas wants us to move and you want us to stay still.”

  “Don’t move.”

  The whine in Brandon’s voice would have been annoying if it hadn’t sounded so terrified. Hayley turned her head to see what he was looking at.

  She immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Another twenty yards past the deer, she saw low shadows moving slowly toward the deer—and them.

  “Oh,” she said. “Ohhh, craaap.”

  Realization had barely registered when one of the shadows bolted away from the group and ran directly for the deer in the moonlight.

  It was a wolf pack, and they were between the children and the resort.

  And they were hunting.

  28

  The cold night air seemed to amplify the light of the full moon overhead as Maggie, Jax and Todd swept their way through around the perimeter of the resort. They had taken the southeast quadrant, which covered the parking lot and the nearby neighborhood.

  “Why didn’t the brass just commandeer these houses for themselves?” Todd asked as they passed a series of upper-middle-class bungalows and split-levels places that sat derelict.

  “Because their soldiers are stuck in cramped quarters under a mountain,” Jax said distractedly as he shone his Fulton across the front yard of one of the houses. “Believe it or not, they actually believe we’re all in this together.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Todd. “If that’s the case, why wasn’t this manhunt going on the night they found Lisa Blume’s body?”

  Maggie reached out and grasped his arm. “Wallace,” she hissed. “This is not the time, believe me.”

  He must have believed her because he kept his mouth shut after that. Maggie could only imagine what was going through Jax’s mind right now. The man he’d considered a father figure murdered by another man he considered a brother. It was impossible to fathom.

  “Echo One, this is Echo Four, over.”

  Jax pulled the radio from his belt. “Echo One here. What have you got, Quaid? Over.”

  “Sir, Lee has found some tracks that lead out from the back of the resort into the golf course. At least a hundred yards’ worth, probably more. Over.”

  “That area leads nowhere,” Jax said to Maggie and Todd. “Just into open fields and then the foothills.”

  Maggie shrugged. “He might be drunk enough that he’s disoriented. Or possibly suicidal.”

  Jax was silent for several moments before he went back to the radio. “Hold off until I get there. We’ll head out together, over.”

  “Sir, you might want to double-time it, over.”

  “Why’s that? Over.”

  “Lee’s pointing out that there are a bunch of smaller tracks—he figures a few separate sets—with the larger tracks, off a few yards to the west. If it is Farries, he’s not the only one out there. And Lee says the size of the other tracks indicate children. Over.”

  Maggie saw Jax’s eyes widen in the moonlight.

  “We’re on our way, over and out.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Jax ignored her as he cranked the small dial of his radio to a different channel.

  “Cheyenne Base, this is Echo One, over.”

  A few seconds passed before the sound of the duty operator’s voice came on. It was Cpl. Fleiss, the young woman who held the post on the overnight shift.

  “Echo One, this is Cheyenne Base. What can I do for you, Captain? Over.”

  “Corporal, I need you to check in with the women’s bunk area. Hayley should be there with three other kids. Over.”

  “Yes, sir, hold for that.”

  Maggie felt her pulse quicken. “Jax, what’s going on?”

  “I need to check something,” he said, his voice tight. “Hayley was supposed to be having a sleepover under the mountain tonight.”

  “Oh, my God.” She put a hand over her mouth. “You don’t think—”

  “Cheyenne Base to Echo One, over.”

  “Echo One, over.”

  “Sir, no one in that sector has seen any children tonight, Hayley included. They assumed she was with you. I can get in touch with the sergeant on duty, see if they can organize a search party, over.”

  “I’ll get back to you, over and out.” He turned to Maggie and Todd. “There’s something wrong. We need to move, now.”

  An instant later, they were all sp
rinting through the night toward the rear of resort, and whatever fate had in store for them out there.

  29

  “Don’t move,” said a voice to Hayley’s right. In her heightened state of fear, it barely registered that she’d never heard it before.

  It was Lucas.

  “They’ll see us if we move,” he hissed. “They respond to motion before anything else. If we just sit and wait until they take down the doe, we can backtrack while they’re eating.”

  “Lucas?” Brandon breathed. “You can talk?”

  “Shhh.” He held a finger to his lips. “No movement, no sound.”

  In the clearing beyond, they watched the deer suddenly twitch as she caught the scent of the pack. She darted back the way she’d come, but it was too late. The wolves had circled her, and every time she tried to run through an opening, they closed it on her.

  Hayley felt her heart speed up as the biggest wolf leapt toward the deer and clamped its jaws around her throat. The deer tried to pull way, tossing her head, but the wolf was too strong. It held on tight as the others moved in and started snapping at the deer’s legs.

  “It’s horrible,” Brooke said.

  Lucas pressed his finger to his lips again.

  “I have to get out of here,” Brandon said in a strained voice. “I have to run.”

  “Do not run,” Lucas hissed.

  Brandon ignored him. “They’re going to get us. I’m not sticking around. I’m going.”

  He stood up and Hayley could see his silhouette against the moon, but a second later, he was back down on the snow. Lucas had reached out and grabbed him so quickly that she barely realized he’d even moved.

  “Stay here,” said Lucas. “Be quiet.”

  But even quick as he was, he was too late. Hayley watched with rising horror as one of the pack turned its huge head in their direction. As the others ripped the doe—it was dead now—into strips, this one dropped its nose to the ground and sniffed.

  “It’s going to find us,” said Lucas. Even terrified as she was, Hayley noticed that his voice was even and strong, like Jax’s. “I’ll get between it and you. When I say run, you run.”