Thurston flicks on his Maglite flashlight, blinding Kane as he gets off a round. Thurston hears the bullet smack into the tree less than six inches to his left.
Kane rips off his goggles but still has no vision. He fires blindly and wildly as Thurston sprints forward and stabs Kane in the chest. Kane grunts and falls but isn’t dead. He shouts something and Thurston hits the ground while Schmidt sets up a hail of shots that cut Kane almost in two. Blood spurts across the snow as Thurston burrows deep into a drift banked against the base of a big pine. Although not hit, he screams convincingly and pulls on his night vision goggles.
Schmidt approaches, on full alert. Screened by a tree, he scans the scene. Thurston knows this last guy won’t be able to tell if either of the bodies sprawled in the snow are his fellow hunters. Hidden in the drift, Thurston bides his time and then, as Schmidt moves forward fractionally, blows his face off with one round from the Remington.
Thurston emerges from the snow drift and gets to work.
Chapter 55
Morning crawls around in the shape of a flat blue-gray light seeping into Isle de Rousse.
At the Talbot Chemical Feed gatehouse, the double-duty security detail has been on full alert all night. The four men have heard the gunfire coming from the forest, but Miller’s given them instructions to stay put unless advised otherwise.
At five before seven there’s enough light for Bridges, the oldest man on duty, to peer through the gatehouse window and see a Jeep parked at the edge of the road where it comes out of the forest.
“Call Miller,” says Bridges. “Tell him we got sump’n down at the gate.”
Bridges picks up his assault rifle and puts on his hat. He motions to another guard, Foley. “Come with me.”
The wind has picked up and, as Bridges and Foley exit the gatehouse, a blast of icy air threatens to rip the door off its hinges.
“Let’s go,” says Bridges. Foley’s moving but doesn’t look exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of leaving the gatehouse.
Battling the wind, Bridges and Foley approach the Jeep, their boots squeaking on the new snow. There’s something on the hood of the Jeep but with all the snow and wind it’s hard to see until they are ten feet away.
“Jesus Christ,” says Foley, and pukes.
The windshield of the Jeep has “Chenoo” scrawled across it in blood. Lashed to the hood like four hunting trophies are the naked bodies of Kane, Schmidt, Palmer, and O’Hara. All of them have had their hearts cut out.
Chapter 56
Thurston’s no machine.
Exhausted, freezing, and hungry, he crawls inside the refuge he’d prepared the previous day inside the dry “cave” formed by three fallen trees. A thick layer of smaller branches forms a roof fixed in place now by a carpet of snow. Thurston has sealed every draft with more packed snow and put a double-layered thermal mat on the floor. He takes off his blood-spattered outer layers and puts on a clean, dry knit cap. He takes off his boots and carefully wraps them in a protective plastic sheet. Thurston crawls inside a military-grade cold-weather sleeping bag. Sitting up with his back against one of the walls of his refuge he cracks the foil seal on a self-heating pack of stew and opens a thermos of hot tea. Thurston works his way through both before lying down, closing his eyes, and falling almost instantly into a bottomless sleep filled with demons.
Chapter 57
Any ice storm is bad news.
The one whipping down from Canada and slamming into northern Vermont that morning is a flat-out, stone-cold bitch.
The gently drifting snow turns to super-cooled rain and freezes on impact. Within minutes, every available surface is covered with a rapidly thickening layer of hard-glaze ice as the wind picks up. Power lines bow under the weight, roads become impassable, water pipes freeze solid, vehicles not under cover become glued fast to the ground, their locking systems iced and fuel lines as brittle as an old man’s arteries.
By midday, East Talbot is effectively cut off from the rest of the world.
At Isle de Rousse, news about the four dead hunters with the missing hearts spreads through the compound like a virus. With the road now an ice rink, eight men take off on foot within an hour of the news breaking and Miller suspects a few more of the weaker-minded ones are thinking about it. The girls at the compound also hear the rumors but Miller doesn’t give a shit if they run. Let the dumb sluts freeze out there. Not one of them would last ten minutes. He’s already had to punish Mercy for talking back to him.
No, what’s done is done. The hunters on the hood of the Jeep, and all the “Chenoo” bullshit tells Miller one thing: the Australian’s declared war. Spooking the men at the compound is smart and a tiny part of Miller grudgingly congratulates his enemy. First create fear. Isn’t that what some Chink warlord said? But Miller doesn’t want any more defections, so he gets the Jeep and the bodies towed out to the old quarry and burned to ash. He has no thoughts on the dead men: just like Viktor and his boys, they fucked up and paid the price.
With the Jeep and hunters out of the way, Miller concentrates on making the compound an impenetrable fortress. He divides the crews up between Donno and Carver, and lets them sort out rotational patrols, lines of fire, and the like. If Thurston’s going to come to him then let’s see what he’s got. Even with the defections, Miller’s got better than thirty hard-core guys left with an arsenal that’d make a general’s mouth water. They have abundant generator power, a ton of supplies, more drugs than a Colombian cartel, plenty of women…all while that Australian bastard’s out there freezing his nuts off.
Hell, this might even be fun.
Chapter 58
Thurston carefully opens one eye and then the other.
It’s more difficult than it sounds—mainly because his eyelids have iced up while he’s been sleeping. Although the temperature inside the thermal sleeping bag is pretty good, inside the forest shelter it has to be said things are a little on the fresh side.
Thurston wriggles a hand up and rubs ice crystals from his eyes. He checks the illuminated dial of his watch: almost three in the afternoon. Without looking outside Thurston knows something is different. The forest is creaking.
Thurston wriggles to the entrance to his shelter and digs a hole in the protective packed ice. Thurston pushes his head through and sees a changed landscape. Every branch of every tree groans under the weight of glaze ice, the lowest limbs connected to the snowbound forest floor by thick icicles. Thurston realizes he’s slept through the arrival of an ice storm.
He replaces the snow in the entrance and frees his arms. He prepares more food and, leaning back against one of the fallen trees, considers his next move. He eyes his backpack and makes a mental list of his armory. It doesn’t fill him with optimism. Thurston’s good but he’s not Superman. Even if the little show he put on with the Jeep worked, Thurston doesn’t think many of the men at the compound will have been spooked enough to leave. He’s hopelessly outgunned and, even if they don’t try and find him, he won’t last too long out here. All Miller has to do is wait it out.
Which means Thurston’s got to even up the odds. He thinks back to previous situations and comes up with one word.
Lasqa.
Chapter 59
Every man’s got a breaking point.
For Cody Thurston it came on June 16, 2007, in Lasqa, Orūzgān Province, southern Afghanistan. Along with neighboring Helmand and Kandahar, Orūzgān stands right at the beating black heart of the Taliban.
Bandit country.
Thurston’s unit is there under Dutch command as part of the International Security Assistance Force during the battle for Lasqa, a town of some five thousand war-weary souls. The Taliban, seeing Lasqa as a key tactical access point, have taken control of the town in brutal fashion, commandeering civilian homes and farms and exacting brutal vengeance on anyone who resists. The police commander of Tander Station is forced to watch his wife’s hands being cut off before he is beheaded. Civilians are given weapons and told by t
he Taliban: fight with us or be executed.
Thurston’s team is instructed to establish a checkpoint a kilometer from town and not to engage. Radio chatter soon tells the Australians that the Dutch and Afghani troops inside the town are in a dogfight.
“This is fucked,” says Dobbs, Thurston’s unit’s comms officer. Dobbs is exchanging intel with an interpreter with the Dutch forward force. “They want us in. It’s a bloodbath and we’re out here checking license plates.”
Thurston says nothing. What is there to say? Dobbs is right: this is another fucked situation in a fucked-up place.
Later, the unit hears the Taliban have begun using a school as an ammo dump with the kids still inside so the Dutch and the Afghanis can’t call in air strikes. In the school, the Taliban behead children who do attempt an escape as a lesson to those remaining. On his break, back in the Hummer, Thurston listens to the children’s screams for longer than he can stand.
He checks his ammunition and leaves the Hummer, heading for the small rise that doubles as a field latrine before he cuts back north toward the town. As he sees things, something needs to be done. A career soldier to his fingertips, Thurston simply cannot sit back and wait as children get slaughtered. Every step he takes toward the school is a step away from his life as a soldier. There’ll be no way back after this even if he survives. But, since that’s the least likely option tonight, Thurston doesn’t give it much thought.
Thurston knows the Taliban fighters didn’t walk to the school. They will have arrived in vehicles and it is these vehicles he intends to find.
After ten minutes, Thurston comes across a marketplace some three hundred yards from the school where eight Toyota pickup trucks are hidden under cover of the dilapidated stalls. Thurston notes only two guards, one on either side, and he kills both by slitting their throats. He opens the gas tanks of all the vehicles and sets them on fire.
Thurston runs back to the school and waits. Less than a minute has gone by before ten or so men exit. Thurston finds a side window and slips inside. In the main hallway are four Taliban fighters at the windows of the school with two or three more standing at the entrance to a back room. Eighty or so children sit in a tight knot in the center, some of them sobbing. On the fringes of the hall are the discarded bodies of eight or nine executed children. Blood spatters the walls.
Thurston opens fire and kills every man standing in a spray of gunfire lasting less than five seconds.
He shouts and points at the door and the children run without speaking. As they disperse into the night to find whatever safety they can, Thurston takes a grenade and lobs it into a back room stacked with ammunition cases and weapons.
He runs.
Fifteen minutes later he’s back at the checkpoint and his military career is over.
Chapter 60
Donno—Jay Donofrio, one of Miller’s two remaining lieutenants—is in a room in a small office block tacked onto the rear of the main house. This office is the security hub at the compound and is where the CCTV monitors are housed. Half of Donofrio’s crew of twelve are actively patrolling the inner perimeter while the others rest. Donofrio is fighting a losing battle with the ice to maintain the security cameras. The storm has already knocked out more than a third and others are falling by the minute. Donofrio watches the screens go blank.
“Shit.” He picks up his radio and updates Carver. Carver’s in control of the area around the three sheds containing the fermentation tanks that combine the dextrose and benzaldehyde into pseudoephedrine.
“If he comes in to you I can’t give you a heads-up,” says Donofrio. “We’re blind down here.”
“If he’s coming in through this shit, I’m a Chinaman,” says Carver. “This storm’s kicking up a coupla notches out here.”
Carver pockets his radio and turns the corner of Shed 1 into the teeth of the wind.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he mutters as ice rattles into his face. He tightens his goggles and the hood of his parka. Up ahead he sees two of his crew on the facing corner. Carver looks out at the icebound forest beyond the fermentation sheds and wonders if the Australian can possibly be still alive.
Chapter 61
Thurston, wearing layer upon layer of high-quality thermal protection, huddles in the lee of a big pine and watches the guy near the closest shed put the radio back in his pocket. Despite what Carver is thinking, Thurston is doing just fine. He wouldn’t like to bet how long he’d last if this becomes a drawn-out battle but Thurston has no intention of letting that happen.
Thurston notes Carver looking thoughtfully at a fence post that houses a security camera. The camera itself is covered in glaze ice and Thurston is betting most, if not all, surveillance cameras protecting the compound are out of action.
Thurston steps out of his cover and walks toward the fence. Wearing white, in near whiteout conditions, he is a ghost.
A heavily armed and well-trained ghost.
By the time he’s reached the fence, Thurston is less than twenty yards from the corner of the shed. He’s watched Carver’s patrols enough to know two men are working each section, the first man some ten yards in front of the other.
Which means that the corner of the shed is an opportunity. Thurston puts a bolt into the crossbow and readies the second.
He waits, forcing himself to concentrate. When the first guy comes around he’ll only get a few seconds.
After a couple of minutes, the first sentry comes into view. Thurston lets him come around the corner and puts a bolt into his chest. The guy slumps to the snow. Thurston pulls back the bow-string and slots in the second bolt. As he’s coming up, the second sentry comes into view, sees the body on the snow, and begins to lift his weapon.
Thurston shoots him in the head with the second bolt. The entire exchange has taken place in complete silence.
Thurston runs back to the forest and pries a fallen log out of the snow. He hauls it back to the fence and throws it against the wire. As he suspected, the fence is no longer electrified. With the power at the compound now on a generator there’s not enough juice in the system to run what they need and keep the fence on. Thurston pulls out a pair of wire cutters and cuts a gap in the fence. He pushes through and runs to the corner of Shed 1. From here he can see Sheds 2 and 3 looking like blurred paper cutouts through the ice storm. The ice is now coming in almost horizontally. Thurston battles his way across the open space to Shed 2. When the sentries come around he kills them both—the first with the crossbow, the second with his hunting knife. At Shed 3 he repeats the process.
According to his calculations there’s still one guy remaining: the guy with the radio. Thurston has him pegged as the boss of this crew but there’s no way of telling where he is now. Thurston can’t wait. He finds a door leading into Shed 3 and slides it back on its track.
Inside, Thurston pushes back his goggles and takes a breath. At first he thinks there is someone moving inside the vast space but realizes it is the storm lashing the tin walls.
Six gleaming steel vats stand in a row down the center of the shed. A low electric hum sits under the sound of the wind.
Thurston takes off his backpack from which he removes three aerosols of hairspray and a small tin of lighter fluid. He places an aerosol under three of the vats and opens the valves. An acrid stench begins to fill the shed. Thurston squirts the lighter fluid around the base of the aerosols. He flicks a lighter and moves down the shed setting a flame to the lighter fluid.
Thurston exits the shed and runs straight into Carver.
Chapter 62
“We got a runner,” says Anders.
Miller gets up off his chair and joins Anders at the window overlooking the lake.
One of the compound girls, wearing jeans and a parka, is slipping and sliding across the frozen lake moving away from the house.
“That dumb bitch ain’t gonna make it,” says Miller.
“You want me to fetch her back?”
Miller shakes his head. “Fuck her.”
He and Anders watch the girl get swallowed by the whiteness. It’s a three-mile hike across to Talbot on a good day. In this storm, dressed like she is, the girl will be dead before the hour.
“We shouldn’t be sitting back and waiting,” says Anders. The big man lumbers across to the bar and pours a bourbon. Miller taps out a line of coke on the marble and hoovers it up greedily. He’s been getting increasingly wired with each passing hour of inactivity.
“I don’t like it any more than you, Axe,” says Miller. “But we—”
Miller stops speaking midsentence as a gunshot sounds from somewhere outside. Miller looks toward Anders and then three explosions come in quick succession sending a shock wave rippling across the compound.
“I guess he’s here,” growls Anders. He smiles and reaches for his gun. “Rock and roll!”
“You dumb shit,” snarls Miller. “That bastard’s blown the sheds!”
Chapter 63
For a big guy, Carver moves quick. Almost too quick.
The muzzle of his assault rifle cuts upward toward Thurston in a vicious arc that would have broken Thurston’s jaw if he hadn’t managed to step inside Carver’s blow and drive the heel of his hand hard into the man’s nose.
Blood flashes through the air and Carver howls like a bastard. Thurston snaps the rifle out of the man’s hands but it spills from his hands and skitters across the ice out of reach.
Thurston takes a step back to give himself room and reaches for his knife. As his fingers close around the handle, Carver recovers his senses enough to come roaring back at Thurston like a grizzly with its tail on fire. Carver traps Thurston’s hand inside his parka and wraps a meaty forearm around the Australian’s throat. Thurston takes a step back that fractionally unbalances Carver. Using his attacker’s weight against him, Thurston dips a shoulder and in one fluid twist, flips Carver over.
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