They locked eyes as they shook hands.
Releasing his powerful grip, the Colonel said, “When all this is over—when our objective has been attained and we can all stand down—you and Stella will spend some time at my home, meet my wife and my family, share a meal with us, talk about the things we will do now that we no longer do this. I hope that’s as appealing to you as it is to me.”
Tom told him that it was.
“Stay safe, son.”
“You, too, sir.”
The Colonel turned and approached Grunn, speaking to her for a moment before making his way toward the waiting Mercedes.
His armed men scanned the surroundings as he moved. Once he was back inside the sedan with the doors closed, they hurried to their respective vehicles.
Twenty
Within a matter of seconds, the Colonel’s contingent had pulled out of the boat launch and was speeding away down the dark lakeside road.
All that remained now were Tom, Cahill, Grunn, and her partner.
The only vehicles were Tom’s pickup, the fourth SUV from Raveis’s caravan, and one of the Colonel’s trio of Range Rovers.
This would be Cahill’s ride out once Tom had been dropped off.
The doors of the Range Rover opened and its driver and passenger stepped out, quickly taking sentry positions.
Like those they replaced, these men were well armed. Tom knew by the length of the barrels that these men carried M4s.
Select-fire military-grade weapons, not semiautomatic AR-15-type carbines.
Tom looked at Grunn and her partner, who were waiting in the parking lot. He and Cahill approached them. Grunn handed Tom his smartphone and makeshift ammo bag as her partner gave to Cahill Tom’s keys and a gallon-size Ziploc bag containing Tom’s Colt.
Cahill kept the keys but passed the Ziploc bag on to Tom.
The weapon had been unloaded, its slide locked back in the open position.
Also in the Ziploc were the single ejected round and the fully loaded magazine that had been removed from the pistol.
Together, Tom and Cahill crossed the parking lot to Tom’s pickup.
Climbing into the passenger seat, Tom realized that he had never sat there before.
It was, he knew, a minor detail, but it was also symbolic of the powerlessness that he was required to endure for now.
His only comfort was that it was Cahill behind the wheel of his truck.
If Tom had to be subordinate to anyone, even for the duration of a car ride home, he was glad it was this man.
Cahill inserted the key into the ignition and started the engine.
Tom confirmed that they had ten minutes or so before they would be clear of the blackout zone.
He had no idea what he was going to say to Stella, but there was something else he would need to do with these few moments before coming up with the right words to say to her.
Cahill steered the pickup out of the boat launch and onto the narrow road, checking the rearview mirror as he drove to make sure that the Range Rover and SUV were behind him.
Tom watched him for a moment. “I need you to do something for me,” he said finally.
Cahill nodded. “Okay.”
“I need you to tell me what’s going on.”
“What the Colonel told you is pretty much all I know, too. He’s serious about compartmentalizing. There were a few things he couldn’t even share with me.”
“No, I meant I need you to tell me what’s going on with you.”
Cahill didn’t respond, but as if to validate Tom’s concerns, the expression he’d seen twice already returned.
Tom had seen haunted men before, men plagued by memories that would never fully leave them, memories that were prompted for immediate and vivid recall by everyday sights and sounds.
He had been one of those men, and for that time he had avoided catching his own reflection anywhere—bathroom mirrors, storefront windows as he walked down streets, even the rearview mirror of his pickup as he drove from one place to the next.
He was one of the lucky ones, though, because his memories―and the effect their sudden return had on his limbic system―had dissipated over time.
Every mile he’d driven during his five years of wandering, every book he’d read on his Kindle, every day that had passed without violence or the threat of it—all this had put the price of war farther and farther behind him.
But now here was Charlie Cahill with the same dark expression—a mix of distraction and pain and remorse.
As well as that all-too-familiar stare, simultaneously cast inward and far away.
Tom had never thought he’d see that telltale mask being worn by his friend, because he’d never met—never fought beside—a man as composed and as capable as the onetime recon marine.
And yet the source of Cahill’s current pain evidently wasn’t the events of his multiple tours of duties in the corps.
That injury had come while he was in the employ of Raveis and the Colonel, when he had failed to save the woman he loved from the men sent to kill her.
There was no doubt in Tom’s mind that he would be just as torn up as the man beside him if he had to face that same failure.
He’d come close to facing it, would in fact be facing it now if Stella didn’t possess certain skills, ones that had been passed down to her by her father along with the Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum that had been his service revolver during his decades as a Connecticut state trooper.
Understanding Cahill’s grief, Tom gave his friend as long as he could, but their time to talk privately was ticking away. So after a moment, he said finally, “Why don’t you tell me what exactly happened last night, Charlie.”
Tom sensed the effort that was required for his friend to return to the present. He sensed, too, that Cahill wasn’t back, at least not all the way.
“It’s not just the firefight, Tom. There’s something the Colonel didn’t tell you. And he didn’t tell you because he doesn’t know. I saw something.”
“What?”
Cahill seemed uncertain where to begin, so Tom prompted him. “Why don’t you tell me how Ula was killed,” he said. “Let’s start with that. Let’s start with the attack and work our way forward from there.”
Cahill nodded and eventually spoke.
As he did, Tom removed his Colt from the Ziploc bag and proceeded to reload it.
“It was an exfil,” Cahill said. “That’s what I do now, that’s all I do. Evasion and escape. Field medic when necessary. I was supposed to get Ballentine’s brother safely out of the city, but he wouldn’t leave without Ula. She’d fled to one of Raveis’s safe houses with her daughter. As we were driving away, they hit us.” Cahill paused. “They were waiting for us. And they hit us bad.”
“Hit you how, exactly?”
“Fifty-cal through the engine block. Shooter firing from the sunroof of your standard black SUV parked about one hundred yards down the block. A second vehicle parked behind it had pulled out and charged to take a nose-to-nose position with us. That’s when the shit really hit the fan.”
Tom asked how many men were involved in the attack.
“Six men on foot, and the sniper and the drivers of the two vehicles, so nine total. The ground-assault team carried a mix of small arms. Some AKs, some Uzis, some short-barreled rifles. The initial attack, after the fifty-cal disabled our engine, wasn’t exactly precision shooting—or that’s what we thought until we concluded that their intent was to keep us inside the vehicle without causing any fatalities.”
“They were pinning you in while they took position outside.”
Cahill nodded. “Yeah. Our only chance was to go on the offensive. Ula took point. She exited and I followed. Our initiative paid off, because right outside the van’s back door we made contact with the first of the shooters, catching him as he was transitioning from his AK to the tear gas gun slung on his other shoulder. Their plan was to gas us out. Ula dropped that first shooter before he even knew what was happen
ing. Two shots to the chest, an immediate follow-up to the head. I took out the man next to him as he was bringing his weapon to bear on her. We’d only been out of the van for maybe two seconds, tops. Everything was happening that fast.”
Cahill paused. Tom inserted the mag into the grip of his Colt, then pulled back the hammer to confirm that the firing pin was in place, a habit of his whenever his firearm was out of his sight for a period of time.
Racking the slide to chamber a round, he flipped the safety up into place with his thumb, then released the mag and topped it off with the loose round from the Ziploc bag.
He paused, though, before reinserting the mag into the grip and looked over at Cahill. “You okay?”
Cahill nodded, but Tom wasn’t convinced, so he told Cahill to pull over.
“I’m good, Tom.”
“Pull over, Charlie, please.”
Cahill did, shifted into park, and killed the motor. He was looking straight ahead.
Tom inserted the loaded mag, leaned forward to holster the Colt, then leaned back in his seat again. He looked straight ahead as well.
Cahill was quiet, and Tom simply waited for him to continue.
Finally, after a long silence, he did.
Twenty-One
“We were in an all-out firefight. The four remaining men in the assault team panicked. Suddenly they were fighting for their lives. Their plan had gone out the window once that first shot was fired, like all plans do. They were shooting wild, opening up on full auto. Uncontrolled and prolonged bursts, not at targets but in the general direction of targets, the kind of shooting that works in places like Mogadishu, you know. Places that are target rich, and someone’s bound to get hit. But there were just the two of us, and every one of those shooters was firing from the hip like an idiot.
“I immediately moved to take the only available cover, which was at the rear of the van, but Ula stayed right where she was. She didn’t panic, didn’t flinch, just calmly dropped to one knee and took out another man with two center-mass hits. Then she took out a third with a single head shot. It was like target practice to her. But I remember thinking that she needed to get the hell out of there. She was exposed, and I really needed her to take cover. Now. You hear all that bullshit about how women shouldn’t be in combat because the men fighting with them will feel overprotective and that mind-set will reduce overall squad effectiveness. It wasn’t that. Her skills were up there with any man I’d ever known. She was even better than most. And she had the kind of courage a man will never really know—the courage of a mother protecting her child. It was this calm ferocity. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever seen it?”
Tom hadn’t, so he shook his head.
Cahill let out a breath before resuming. “But as I was looking at her, it wasn’t her I was seeing. It wasn’t her in harm’s way. It was Erica. I was back there in that motel parking lot. It was that night all over again—the night I couldn’t save her. That’s where my mind was. That’s what I was seeing. I moved to position myself so I could look around the van’s rear quarter and target the remaining two men, but I couldn’t move fast enough. I could see that Ula was pivoting in their direction, so it was just a matter of who targeted them first, her or me. I reached the corner and did a quick look around it and saw that these last two men were firing into the right side of the van. They couldn’t see their teammates on the left side, so they didn’t know they were dead. I didn’t understand why they were doing what they were doing, shooting into the van’s rear compartment like they were, and then I realized that Hammerton had stuck the muzzle of his SIG through one of the many bullet holes in the side panel and was firing at them. He was drawing their fire and they were returning it, not aiming high like they had been during their initial attack, but lower, straight into the rear compartment. You could see the panic—it was all over them, in the way they stood with their feet too wide apart and their shoulders held up high and their chins ducked down into their chests.
“And that’s when something strange happened. Something I still don’t understand. Before Ula or I could fire—before we could even get our weapons on those last two shooters—one of them was cut in half. He was standing there, firing, and then a second later his body was in two pieces on the pavement.”
“The sniper took him out,” Tom said.
Cahill nodded. “He’d taken out his own man, and with an armor-piercing round, by the way it split him in half. But why, right? I mean, that’s the question. Was it to keep someone inside the van from getting killed? That had to be the reason. But who?”
Tom had no answer, so he offered none.
“The last man standing was just as confused as I was by what had happened to his partner. He froze for a second, looked around, and that’s when he saw Ula to his right, kneeling and bringing her Kel-Tec up on him. He spun to face her, but he had pulled the trigger prematurely, firing before he even had his AK leveled. His first few rounds impacted the pavement right in front of her. Several of them fragmented; I caught some of the pieces in my face and neck. That caused me to turn away. It was reflex. I was out of the fight for maybe two seconds, tops. Even though the shooter had fired low, he was still on full auto, and the muzzle rise that caused solved his problem with aiming too low. The first round of his to hit her struck just as she had gotten him in her sight picture and squeezed the trigger. I turned back in time to see that. Even when she was under fire—even when rounds were impacting right in front of her—she took her time to aim. The first round struck her in the upper leg; the second hit her in the pelvis; the third caught her ribs on her left side. But her single shot—her only and last shot—went right through his mouth. He dropped instantly.”
Cahill stopped there.
Tom waited.
“You know, I never felt rage in battle,” Cahill said. “Back in Iraq, during my first tour, I once ran under fire to retrieve the severed hand of one of my men. I didn’t feel rage at the asshole that had caused my man to lose his hand. I didn’t feel rage at the assholes that were firing at me as I ran out into the street. Rage in the heat of battle gets you killed. It gets your men killed. Two tours of duty, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, then two more tours with Force Recon, and I never felt rage. But I did last night. Have you ever felt it, Tom? I’m talking about blinding rage. Rage that overtakes you, that disconnects you from any and all sense of reason.”
Tom nodded. “Of course. Yeah.”
“I didn’t try to ignore it or stop it. I didn’t want to. It felt so . . . justified. The sniper was still out there, and I wanted him. It was a disproportionate desire for vengeance—I mean, I didn’t know Ula, I wasn’t invested in her in any way emotionally, but none of that seemed to matter. It’s obvious why, right? I mean, let’s be honest. I was out of my mind. I was as far away from all my training as I could get. It was like I wasn’t a marine anymore. It was like I had never been a marine.”
Tom didn’t say anything at first. He understood the significance of what Cahill had just confessed.
Finally, he asked what Cahill did next.
“You want to know what I did? I pulled one of the spare mags from my jacket pocket. I had managed to keep a count of how many rounds I had fired so far—that much I was able to do. I knew what I had left, but I also knew I’d need more. I wanted more. I wanted to fill every one of those remaining men—the sniper and the two drivers—with as many sixty-two-grain, steel-cored penetrators as I could. I wanted them mangled. So I held the spare mag in my left hand—you know the technique, pinning it to my palm with my ring and pinky fingers and supporting the forend of my carbine with my other fingers and thumb. I was ready for a fast reload, ready to just unload on them everything I had. I surrendered my covered position and ran out into the street, made my way around the left side of the SUV parked nose-to-nose with the van, and took aim through the passenger door window at the driver. He had a pistol drawn and fired twice at me, but I knew by the position of the muzzle and the way it jerked when he pull
ed the trigger that his aim was off. Because I was in motion my sights were wavering, so I slowed to a glide for a few steps and waited till the waver decreased enough and my sights were on target more than they were off. I let the air out of my lungs and squeezed off three shots, then another three. The instant I saw the driver slump, I turned and faced the SUV down the block.
“And there he was, his head just above the open sunroof, the flash suppressor at the end of his fifty-cal angling to stay on me as I moved. He’d have me in seconds, I knew it, and there was no way that I was going to get him, not at this distance and with me in motion, so I did the only thing I could, I bent down low, compressed myself into the smallest target possible, and veered right, taking aim at the windshield as I did. The driver’s side of it was a big enough target that I knew I’d hit it, even at this distance. Then I just lay in on the trigger, again and again. The windshield was armored glass, but I wasn’t looking for a kill shot at that point. The impact of each round left behind those little frosted stars, and that’s what I was after. I wanted to disrupt the driver’s view and cause him to panic. The instant the first few rounds hit the glass, the SUV lurched forward, and the sniper lost his fixed firing position. His head was still out, he was still making an attempt to zero me, but I maintained my fire and kept that running count in my head. When I knew the last round had chambered, I released the empty mag and slapped in the backup. This way I didn’t have to bother with the slide release and could get back on my target with barely any interruption. I just hammered away at that windshield again and again as the SUV approached. I couldn’t see the driver through the chips in the glass, which meant the driver couldn’t see me, but he was barreling down on me, heading right for me, and when he was right there, maybe twenty feet away, I laid off just long enough to shift my front sight to the man in the sunroof. The instant I squeezed off the first round, he ducked down, but before he disappeared, I’d seen him. I’d seen his face. And he’d seen me. I continued to fire till the last minute, then jumped out of the way. The SUV passed me and I fired into it till my mag was empty. The driver’s windshield was all messed up, but the passenger side was still clear enough. The sniper must have been directing the driver, because the SUV made the next turn and was gone.
The Rogue Agent (The Agent Series) Page 13
