Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  It wasn’t a bad idea. By firing into the gathering crowd, he could disrupt their assault even before it began. It was such a rookie mistake for them put all of their forces in such a small area that it almost seemed irresponsible not to capitalize on it.

  Unless it wasn’t a mistake. A piece of the puzzle fell into place for Jonathan.

  “Hey, Big Guy-”

  From a hundred yards away, the woods line came alive with muzzle flashes as the opposing force-the opfor-opened up with a torrent of small-arms fire. Their bullets hit with the sound of so many hammers pounding on the wall. Jonathan brought his weapon to his shoulder and slipped his finger in the guard.

  For every muzzle flash, there was a shooter just two feet behind it.

  Then he understood.

  “Everybody away from the windows!” he yelled.

  Boxers looked at him as if he’d just discovered a second nose on his face.

  “Nobody return fire,” Jonathan ordered. “They’re trying to draw muzzle flashes. That’s why they’re being so obvious.”

  That didn’t help Boxers. And then he got it. “The fifty cal,” he said. It was the gun they’d heard being fired while surveilling Michael Copley’s house. He pulled away from his window.

  “Everybody come into the sanctuary,” Jonathan said. “And everybody stay down.”

  Gail looked particularly confused. “But what about-”

  An explosion cut her words-a startling double blast, followed by a fireball and stuff erupting on the altar just beside her. She dropped instantly.

  Then the living nightmare began.

  Brother Kendig could sense the soldiers’ relief when he told them to open fire from way back here. That meant not exposing themselves to return fire. At least for now. There was something oddly beautiful about watching a building come apart a chunk at a time under the onslaught of bullets. Even in the relative darkness of the starlight, he could see chunks and crumbs flying away.

  But those were distractions. He stayed focused on the front windows. Once he saw a flash of return fire, he’d know exactly where to put his Raufoss rounds, and once he started placing them, he wouldn’t stop until there were no more to place.

  Only the return fire didn’t materialize.

  “Could they be dead?” Brother Absalom shouted over the din.

  Kendig couldn’t see how. But he was tired of waiting. “Open fire,” he said.

  Ryan would never admit this, but he was relieved by the word to pull away from the windows. As tired as he was of this shit, and as cruel and awful as these Klansmen or whatever were, he didn’t think he had it in him to kill them. Brother Stephen had been an accident. That was a whole world away from aiming at a human target and shooting it. He didn’t even like first-person-shooter video games. Way too intense.

  In the dark light of the candle wash from the sanctuary, he could see that his mom was relieved, too.

  The urgency in Scorpion’s voice was scary, though. Apparently there was danger in The front wall of the church erupted in splashes of white-hot silver and gold fire as thunder boomed through the sanctuary and huge holes were blown through the front and back walls. Pews erupted in fountains of splintering wood. It was too much to take in all at once. Whole chunks of their universe were exploding, one after another, with less than a second in between.

  Ryan and his mom stood there, half crouched and frozen in the doorway between the vestry and the sanctuary. He’d never seen this kind of destruction. Off to his left, the altar turned to powder. To his right, the front wall was burning in half a dozen places, and spot fires flared throughout.

  The noise was unbearable-off-the-charts loud, like Fourth of July times ten.

  His mother was screaming. So was he, he thought, but all he could hear was the rapid-fire boom-boom-boom of whatever they were shooting at him.

  The dim light of the room grew darker as the smoke from the fires billowed under the roof, and soon he found himself coughing from it.

  Ryan and Christyne were both staring at the tableau of billowing destruction when Scorpion tackled them.

  People never ceased to amaze Jonathan. Their capacity for self-endangerment-known in his world as simple stupidity-seemed limitless.

  The Nasbes just stood there like human targets, out in the open, watching the damage caused by the world’s most powerful sniper weapon as if it were a football game. He scrambled down the green side aisle as round after round sailed over his body to wreak havoc within the church.

  “Get down!” he yelled. “Ryan! Christyne! Get down!” But they continued to stare.

  If Jonathan was destined to lose this one, this was not how it was going down. He was not going to see them blown apart like pottery targets at a carnival shooting game. Throwing away countless years of experience and training, he rose to his feet under fire and took them both down with all the subtlety of a goal line tackle.

  They hit hard, and Ryan howled in agony as Jonathan lay across both of them to protect them with his body.

  “Ow!” Ryan yelled. “Oh, God, my arm!”

  “You’re hurting him!” Christyne yelled, and she pushed at Jonathan to get off of her.

  “Stop!” Jonathan commanded. “Both of you, just stop!”

  The command worked.

  Jonathan felt for the kid. On the positive side, he was still breathing enough to yell, and he was not going to die as long as Jonathan was still alive.

  In a minute or so, the punishing onslaught ended as abruptly as it has started. Dozens of spot fires had been ignited, and the entire front wall-what was left of it-was ablaze. Two-inch holes had been blasted through the armored masonry in dozens of places, and the shutters had been reduced to tatters.

  “What the hell was that?” Gail yelled from the back of the sanctuary.

  The sound of her voice answered half Jonathan’s immediate question as he rose from the PCs. “Big Guy?”

  “Whole and healthy,” he said. “Here they come.” Rising to one knee, Boxers brought his M4 to his shoulder and opened fire, sending twenty rounds downrange in one fully automatic string, and then he ducked for cover as a new fusillade of. 50-caliber rounds consumed his corner of the world with debris and fire.

  The punishing assault had just ended when Boxers’ face appeared at the end of the nearest line of pews. “We can’t stay here, Boss,” he said.

  “I concur,” Gail said, appearing a few seconds later. “Who knew they had a cannon out there?”

  Jonathan ran the options through his head and came up with nothing but bleak outcomes. If they stayed in here, they’d either get burned out or sniped out. If they tried to escape the building, they’d get torn apart; but even if they could make it to the woods, what then? Enemy evasion was a specialized enough skill for professionals. He had a mother and her son along for the ride.

  His instincts said to stay put and fight it out, but that option, bravado aside, could only end badly for all of them.

  His earpiece popped as someone broke squelch on the radio. Kendig Neen’s voice said, “Last chance to surrender. That is, if you’re still alive. In thirty seconds, we’re coming for you.”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers. “We’ve had this discussion before,” Big Guy said. “I don’t surrender. You want to try to make a break with them in tow, I’ll cover your six, but I don’t surrender to nobody.”

  Christyne cried, “They’re going to kill us all!”

  He looked to Gail. “I don’t see we have a chance either way,” she said.

  “I’ll take that as a vote to fight,” Jonathan said.

  She shrugged.

  Christyne whined, “Maybe they’ll show mercy if we surrender?”

  “No way,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen their mercy. I’m not going through-” He paused. “I hear a helicopter.”

  “Fifteen seconds,” Neen said.

  Jonathan glanced past the fire and saw skirmish lines forming. With the shutters gone, that would be their entry point. He heard the helicopters, too.
“Big Guy?”

  Boxers cocked his head. He scowled. Then he smiled. “Little Birds?”

  Then, as if in answer to his question, a new voice arrived in his ear. “Scorpion, this is Romeo Foxtrot Six.”

  The cavalry had arrived.

  The sound of approaching helicopters startled Kendig. Aircraft never flew over this part of the world, unless they were ferrying Brother Michael from one place to another. Was it possible that he’d sent for his chopper to flee by air? If that were the case, then he must have been hiding from Sister Colleen when she went to his house to collect the weapons.

  Then he heard the new voice on the radio. “… Romeo Foxtrot Six. We’re on quarter-mile final, coming in hot, and recommending you stay inside with your heads down.”

  His stomach seized at the realization of what was happening. The sound of the rotors grew louder. The soldiers heard it, too, and shifted their gaze skyward, but there was nothing there. The sky remained black, free of any signs of approaching aircraft. All he saw were stars.

  “There!” someone yelled, and he fired his rifle into the night sky.

  Kendig saw the ink-stain silhouette against the stars just a second before the sky started returning fire. Muzzle flashes strobed like angry fireflies as the helicopter swooped to the ground with startling speed, and then, after only a second or two on the ground, swooped back into the sky.

  Five seconds later, it happened again. The night roared with the sound of rotors and gunshots as the second chopper touched down and took off.

  Now, though, the gunfire was louder. Black-clad killers moved out there among them, rending devastation.

  Soldiers of the Army of God did their best to shoot, but no one knew for sure what the targets were, or where they were. Near Kendig, and all around him, people were dying in the darkness. He felt blood splash his face as one of the soldiers closest to him fell across the Barrett, rendering it momentarily useless.

  Kendig looked to his left, to where Brother Absalom should be crouched with the other Barrett, but the young man had literally been blown in half at his navel.

  Panic of the most malignant kind spread like floodwaters through a field, and in mere moments, the Army of God had been reduced to a fleeing mob. They pushed and jostled Kendig, who wasted precious seconds trying to reorganize them into something resembling a fighting force, but in the darkness and the confusion, that moment had passed.

  With no one left to lead, he joined his fleeing troops.

  CHAPTER THIRTY – THREE

  Back in the sanctuary, Jonathan and his team had taken a position on the floor at the base of the stage that held the altar. They sat back-to-back in a circle around the Nasbes, weapons pointed out to address any threat that might materialize.

  Jonathan could see nothing useful from their position, but the sounds told him everything. The crescendo of fire as the MH6 Little Bird choppers flared to land, and then the roar of the rotors as they took off two seconds later. In his mind, he could visualize Unit operators peeling off of the outboard benches to do what they did best.

  The shooting peaked over the course of fifteen or twenty seconds, and then the shooting turned to the sounds of panic that always indicated the beginning of the end. The shooting slowed to singles, and then it stopped completely.

  Jonathan’s earbud popped. “Scorpion, Romeo Foxtrot Six. LZ is secure. Advise when you’re ready for exfil.”

  This was too much. Could it really be this easy? He pressed his mike button. “Exfil in one.” He stood, and along with Boxers and Gail, extended assisting hands to the Nasbes to help them rise.

  Ryan looked terrible. The cumulative effect of fear and exhaustion-and maybe blood loss-had turned his skin gray. His mom looked confused and terrified. “What now?” she said.

  Jonathan loved this part. “It’s over. You’re going home.”

  Mother and son exchanged glances that betrayed their skepticism.

  “Really,” Gail said. Outside, the night filled again with the sound of an approaching chopper.

  Despite the presence of friendlies, Jonathan and his team kept the Nasbes in the middle of a protective wedge as he walked quickly without running to the front doors. He threw the giant latch and pushed the heavy doors open-just a crack at first, as he double-checked against some kind of trap, and then all the way to allow everyone to pass.

  Colonel Rollins met him just outside the door, where strewn bodies lay untouched and blood appeared black on the concrete. “I told you we monitor everything,” he said, answering Jonathan’s unasked question.

  Actually, it answered only one; but the others could wait until the PCs were secure.

  The Little Bird sat on the ground, its rotors cutting a windy disk in the frigid night. Jonathan counted eight black-clad operators surrounding the chopper, their weapons directed at every compass point. Rollins led the way to the tiny door in the chopper’s side. He pulled it open and gestured for the PCs to enter.

  Christyne looked stunned. Hesitant.

  “It’s all right,” Rollins shouted over the roar of the engine. “With Boomer’s compliments.”

  Ryan perked up at the name. “Dad’s here?”

  Rollins shook his head. “No, but you’ll see him soon.”

  “Where?”

  Rollins shot a look to Gail. “Soon,” he said. “Time to climb aboard.”

  Gail understood the hesitation to mean that she wasn’t cleared to know their final destination.

  As Ryan scrambled aboard, Christyne looked first at Boxers, and then to the rest of the team. “Thank you,” she said. She reached out for Big Guy, offering him a hug.

  Entering rare territory for him, he allowed it to happen.

  “You’re very strong, you know,” Christyne said.

  Jonathan realized that he’d never seen Boxers blush before. At least not like that.

  As she pushed away, Rollins put a hand at her back to urge her into the Little Bird. No one was safe until they were airborne.

  Christyne braced herself against the door and turned one last time. “God bless you all,” she said.

  The instant she was clear of the door, Rollins slammed it closed, and the chopper was airborne, leaving them all to look away and close their eyes against the rotor wash.

  Rollins said something into his radio that Jonathan couldn’t hear, but soon the infil choppers were returning for exfil.

  “What’s next?” Jonathan asked the colonel as the birds got louder.

  “I guess we all go home,” Rollins said. “Mission accomplished.”

  Jonathan made a broad gesture with both arms. “What about all this?”

  “All what?” Rollins said. “I don’t see a thing. I couldn’t. We’ve been on a training mission a hundred miles from here.”

  “We could use your help,” Jonathan said. “These assholes dispatched execution teams across the country. We need to find out who and where.”

  Rollins shook his head. “Negative. We had one mission, and we accomplished it. You’re welcome, by the way.”

  Jonathan felt a pang of embarrassment. “Appreciate the help.”

  The colonel shrugged as if it was nothing. The night started churning again as two more choppers dropped from the sky and flared to land. Rollins offered his hand, and Jonathan took it. “And we appreciate the loyalty. Sorry I can’t offer you a ride. We’re loaded to the max. I’ll have a hell of a time explaining the hours and the fuel consumption as it is.”

  Translation: Roleplay Rollins had stuck out his neck as far as it would go.

  “No problem,” Jonathan said. “I’ve got a ride.”

  Rollins looked relieved. “Good luck, Digger.”

  The Little Birds were airborne again within seconds of landing. Then Jonathan and his team were alone again with the dead and the wounded.

  “One-way asshole,” Boxers growled. He shouldered his weapon and started scanning for targets. “This is a bad place to be, Boss. There’s still a lot of people and weapons unaccounted for. I
vote we start hiking.”

  “What about these people?” Gail asked. “They’re wounded. Suffering. We can’t just leave them.”

  “Watch me,” Boxers said. He started moving away, ever vigilant.

  Jonathan shouldered his weapon and followed.

  “No!” Gail said. Her voice was firm, insistent. In different circumstances, petulant. “Look at what we’ve done. We can’t just leave it this way.”

  Something snapped in Jonathan. He let his weapon fall against its sling, and he turned on her. “We cannot stay,” he said. He felt blood pounding in his ears. “We didn’t start this fight, we finished it. Everything that flows afterward is someone else’s problem. We’ve got a long hike out of here, and I’m not endangering the team.” Without NVGs to mask them, her eyes showed hurt and anger. “This is not negotiable,” he said. “Now move.”

  “What about the ongoing threat?” Gail countered. “What about all the innocents who will die? Don’t we owe the whole friggin’ world a little intel gathering?”

  “The whole friggin’ world is pursuing their own leads. They chose not to pursue these. I’ll make a call to Wolverine when we’re back in the world. She can do with the information what she wants.”

  “You’re going to tell her about this carnage?”

  “Of course not. I won’t have to. If I tell her to take a peek up here, I believe she’ll put two and two together.”

  “And meanwhile, terrorist teams are free to roam, spreading random violence.”

  Jonathan took a step closer and lowered his voice. “Dammit, Gail, our mission was to save one family. It’s done. Successful beyond any imagined outcome. Let’s call it a day and leave saving the world to Batman and the Justice League.”

  “But we-”

  “ Now, Gail.” He waited until she settled her hand on her weapon and moved to join Boxers.

  The final look that she flashed at him before moving was one he hoped he’d never see again.

  They moved through the night with combat stealth, staying in the cover of the woods. Weapons ever at the ready, they spread out, keeping twenty paces between them, with Boxers in the lead and Gail in the middle, due to the lack of night vision. They moved with agonizing slowness as they lifted their feet and brought them down in silence.