Passing him, one right after the other, they head toward the front door.
It is a breezy autumn night, the long hiss of the leaves stirring on the swaying branches covering the sound of their footsteps.
Tom is helpless as they breach the door and pour through it.
He is helpless as they move into his home like a brutal, cold wind.
He wants to go after them, to pursue them and stop them, but he is unable.
All that he knows—all that he can do, all the skills he has acquired and maintained in his lifetime—don’t matter, because he cannot follow.
He cannot follow because he wasn’t really there.
No one was.
His mother and sister had been at the mercy of men who had none.
Men who hurt and killed for both greed and pleasure.
Standing across the street, frozen, Tom hears the first of the screams.
As Ula had done for her daughter, according to Cahill, so Tom’s mother had done for hers.
She’d fought back.
Tom woke from the dream, his bare torso slick with cold sweat, his chest heaving.
Sleeping beside him was Stella.
He lay still, could hear only his breathing—a wheeze as air was drawn in through his nose, a gasp as he exhaled through his mouth.
It took a moment before he could think, and then another before he could hear anything more than his labored breaths.
And what he heard then was the sound of a dog barking in the distance.
Not the lazy baying of a hound, which he often heard coming from one of the nearby farms.
No, this was different.
This was what he’d been listening for and hoping never to hear since their first night in this place.
This was the unmistakable sound of a dog alarmed by the presence of something, or someone, an urgent bark coming from the south that repeated over and over without any change in pitch or rhythm.
Tom recognized this for what it was: a dog giving frantic warning.
Instantly, he was in motion.
Twenty-Five
Communication in battle was crucial, and Tom had taken that into consideration.
Much of what he would need to relay to Stella in a time of crisis he could do with prearranged hand signals, but for situations when they could not see each other—either because of darkness or separation—verbal commands, as short as possible, had been established.
All he needed to do once he’d woken her was to speak two words.
He touched her shoulder, and her eyes opened immediately.
“Safe room,” he said. Their current situation, however, required that Tom add three more words—ones they hadn’t worked out in advance. “Get the girl.”
Stella looked at him for a brief moment, her eyes wide, but then she, too, was in motion, rising from their bed and grabbing her jeans and putting them on.
As she did that, Tom reached for the Marlin in its corner. Grabbing it, he laid it down on his side of the mattress, then dropped to his knees and reached under the bed for the ranger backpack he kept there.
He clutched the pack and pulled it out.
Unzipping it, he pulled out two plate carrier vests, each one housing a pair of quarter-inch steel plates, one in the front and the other in the back.
In a canvas MOLLE pouch attached to each vest was a handheld, two-way radio equipped with a throat mic and earpiece.
Tom tossed one of the carriers onto Stella’s side of the bed. Her jeans on, she lifted the vest over her head and lowered it till it was fitted around her torso, then clipped together the side straps.
Instead of putting the other carrier on, Tom stripped it of its radio setup before tossing it, too, onto Stella’s side of the bed.
He nodded toward the vest and said, “The girl.”
Stella nodded to indicate she understood, then grabbed her Smith & Wesson revolver from her nightstand, along with a small shoulder bag containing a paddle holster and two boxes of ammo.
She looked at Tom one last time before hurrying out the bedroom door. The .357 was tucked into her waistband, and she was affixing the microphone to her throat as she moved.
Clipping his radio to his belt, Tom grabbed his 1911 and map bag containing a half dozen eight-round magazines, then slung the Marlin over his shoulder and moved to their only window, positioning himself to the left of it.
As he put on his throat mic, he leaned forward for his first look outside and saw the two dumpsters below, his pickup, and the SUV parked near them.
Scanning the line of pine trees just beyond, he saw nothing, though he was able to determine now that the barking was coming from the other side of their property, so he crossed the hall to the room opposite their bedroom.
As he did, Stella ushered the girl from her bedroom to the safe room directly across.
The space Tom entered was little more than a closet, crammed with cardboard boxes containing various paper goods. Wedging the earpiece into his ear, Tom ran a coms test, saying in a soft voice, “Check, check.”
Stella’s voice came through the earpiece right away. “Receiving.”
Tom asked her to confirm that she was in position, and she replied that she was.
He said, “Stand by.”
Taking the slung Marlin from his shoulder, he approached the window, drawing back and releasing the bolt, chambering a round.
The room was so narrow he had no choice but to stand directly in front of the glass.
This side of their property was lined with pine trees as well, though there was a broad opening in the center that allowed Tom to see a good portion of the farmer’s field beyond.
His eyes went to that opening, focusing on the horizon and looking for silhouettes moving against the night sky. He saw nothing at first, but he trusted that if the dog’s bark meant what his gut told him it meant, this was the spot where approaching attackers would appear.
Tom kept his breathing even and slow and let his mind go blank so that it could react faster to incoming visual stimuli. He couldn’t want to see it, simply needed to be ready when he did.
A moment passed, then another—Tom counted a dozen barks before he finally spotted shapes against the sky.
“Contact rear,” he said. “Coming from the south.”
“Copy.”
He began to count the men—one, two, three.
Then more appeared.
And still more.
He didn’t want to relay how many were out there until he was certain, but by the time the count had reached nine, he saw no more appear in the break.
“We’ve got nine,” he said.
From his earpiece came Stella’s voice.
He heard the first hint of fear.
“Jesus,” she said.
Tom grabbed hold of the cardboard box nearest to the window and dragged it beneath the bottom pane.
The box contained used hardcover books and old phone directories, all stacked tight like bricks, six long and dozens deep. The barrier, combined with the wall against which the box was pressed, would be sufficient to stop—or at least slow to a less-than-fatal velocity—a rifle round of intermediate power, particularly one designed to fragment.
Tom took a kneeling position behind the box, raised the window by a few inches with his left hand, then readied himself.
He watched as the men drew closer. Suddenly, they veered to their right, moving as a pack and abandoning the wide opening for the cover of the line of trees.
Maneuvering to the east, they headed to where the tree line was consistent and the cover it offered would allow them to get closer while remaining unseen.
Tom suspected that a handful of men would also peel off into a fire team and approach the back of the building, while the remaining men would continue around to the front.
Within a few seconds, that was exactly what occurred: a four-man team stopped, each man dropping down to a crouch and waiting for their cue to emerge and rush the rear, while five men continu
ed on, quickly passing out of Tom’s line of sight.
He immediately displaced, crossing the hallway and returning to the bedroom window, instructing Stella as he moved to get ready to hit them with the lights.
“Copy.”
Standing to the left of the window, he leaned forward and surveyed the scene below. The SUV was still there, its tinted windows preventing Tom from seeing the three occupants.
He had no way of warning them—a flaw in their planning, he realized now, something that he or Grunn should have considered and taken care of with a simple exchange of cell phone numbers.
But it was too late for that.
His only hope was that someone inside the vehicle was looking out and would see the approaching men.
If that didn’t happen, then the lights would alert them.
Of course, by then it might be too late.
Tom lost sight of the five men moving through the trees; it was just too dark on this side of their property. For several long seconds he had nothing, but then he detected movement—a low branch was jostled—and that was all he needed to reacquire them and determine their position and rate of approach.
Fifty feet from the SUV, which itself was another fifty from the restaurant.
The average person, moving at a sprint, could cross fifty feet in less than four seconds.
Not a lot of time to target and shoot.
Tom’s Marlin was chambered in the .45-caliber pistol round, and though its effective range was roughly 150 yards, and these men were well within that, the .45-cal was a heavy and relatively slow-moving bullet.
To add to Tom’s disadvantage was the fact that he would be shooting at a downward angle, a situation in which targets appeared closer than they actually were. He’d have to take that into account and make adjustments, if he was to have first-shot accuracy.
And he’d have only seconds in which to do that.
Tom focused instead on the advantages he had—the precautions he had taken with this very scenario in mind.
Kneeling, he raised the window a few inches.
It moved easily and quietly. During renovations, he had replaced the century-old pulley wheel with a brand-new one and updated the frayed rope with one made of nylon and coated with urethane.
He had also opened up the drywall and placed a half-inch-thick steel plate between the studs.
Readying his Marlin, he said to Stella, “Once you hear shots, displace.”
“Copy.”
Tom waited, controlling his breathing and heart rate, keeping his mind clear and ready.
He saw the first men emerge from the tree line—three of them moving shoulder-to-shoulder, dressed in full tactical gear.
Black clothing and boots, black vests and operator helmets. Walking like trained fighters, they moved at a steady pace.
He let them take four strides, needed that time to sight the center man, then said, “Hit them with the lights.”
In the safe room was a panel that controlled every light inside the building as well as the eight 1,000-watt halogen spotlights mounted along the edge of the roof.
Stella flipped the switch marked FL, and instantly every corner of the property was transformed from nighttime into high noon.
The men reacted to the sudden change in environment by lowering their centers of gravity and picking up their pace, shifting from a soldier’s stealthy glide to an all-out run.
Their weapons were raised and directed squarely at the SUV.
Their attack would begin by taking out its occupants.
Which meant that they knew what the SUV contained.
He couldn’t think about what that meant, though, had to keep his focus, maintain his front sight on the center man.
Only seconds remained.
That target had taken just one step and was beginning his second when Tom squeezed the trigger.
Twenty-Six
The center man dropped fast, landing flat on his back, so Tom shifted to his next target—the shooter that had been to the downed man’s right, closer to Tom by a few feet.
But the two men had obviously heard the shot, maybe even witnessed their teammate go down, and responded by fanning out, diverging from their straight path and taking wide and opposing, arcing ones toward their target.
They opened fire on the SUV with fully automatic weapons.
Tom was focused on bringing down the second shooter so he could move to the third, but there was a fine line between focus and fixation.
He was sighting in the second shooter when he realized he had succumbed to tunnel vision, knew he had to make a quick check of his surroundings.
When he did, he saw that the man he had shot was not dead.
He wasn’t even wounded.
Rolling to his side, the man rose to a kneeling position and prepared to return Tom’s fire.
The vests these men wore weren’t a means of bearing extra magazines and other necessities.
Their full tactical gear included body armor, which pretty much guaranteed that the operator helmets they wore were Kevlar-lined.
Assuming a rating of II-A, those helmets would be more than enough to stop a .45 round, even one fired from a sixteen-inch carbine.
The instant Tom spotted the kneeling man, he dropped below the windowsill just as the man fired.
The multiple rounds shattered the panes of glass and tore through the upper ceiling of the bedroom, but then the shooter laid off the trigger long enough to lower his aim and open up again.
Tom heard the rounds impacting the metal plating inside the wall just inches from his head.
His position blown, he got into a crouch and hurried out of the bedroom, intending to head down the hallway to the safe room.
But just as he reached the door, the four-man team at the rear of the building opened up as well.
Several automatic weapons firing from several different positions, all of them trained on the part of the upper floor that Tom occupied, told him that the two teams were in communication.
It was as if Tom had stepped into a beehive.
He dropped to his stomach as the rounds flew above him and proceeded to crawl down the hallway.
Reaching the safe room, he pushed the door open.
The room was empty, just as it should be, with the escape hatch he had fashioned in the floor still open.
Rising back to a crouch, he hurried to the opening and looked down through it and saw Stella and Valena at the bottom of the emergency rope ladder.
They both looked up at him.
“Basement,” he said.
Dropping the hatch, he moved to the wall.
The shielding of hardbacks and phone books under a layer of ceramic tile would withstand a steady barrage of intermediate-powered rounds.
Tom knew well the sound of the 5.56 NATO round being fired by a carbine, and that was what he’d been hearing so far. But given the level of gear with which these men were equipped, there was no reason for him to think that there wasn’t a heavier weapon among them.
And what was it Cahill had said?
A .50-cal had disabled his vehicle.
The fire from the rear ceased suddenly, but the firing in the parking lot out front continued.
During renovations, Tom had cut out a small port in the wall, then blocked it off with a brick made of glued-together ceramic tiles.
A makeshift handle was affixed to that brick.
Grabbing the handle, Tom pulled the block from the gun port and positioned himself in front of it.
Six inches high and a foot long, the opening was just big enough, if he shifted his position, for Tom to have a full view of the front of the property, including the area off to the side where the dumpsters were located and his truck and the SUV were parked.
He saw that the three gunmen had reached the SUV—one standing behind it, another by the driver’s side, the third by the passenger side.
They were burning through mags, shooting up the vehicle at near-point-blank range.
At this range and under continuous fire, it was only a matter of time before the windows of the fully armored vehicle fractured to the point of failure.
Tom had to act, and fast.
He slid the barrel of the Marlin through the port, did so just enough so the muzzle was clear, and took aim at the only man facing him.
The man standing by the driver’s side.
He was wearing a helmet, and he had goggles on as well.
So Tom aimed for the only potentially fatal target not protected by body armor.
The imaginary triangle between his nose and his chin.
As Tom eased his breathing in preparation of firing, he heard the sound of pounding coming from below.
The clang of metal striking against metal.
The four-man team was attempting to breach the rear door with a handheld battering ram, but the door was heavy steel and seated in a frame constructed of the same material.
And the door opened out, not in.
They could bang on it all night and it wasn’t going to give way.
The pounding, though, stopped after only four strikes—the men had obviously wised up and abandoned the battering ram, but it was possible that they were equipped with a hydraulic prying tool.
It was a slower process that required affixing the device and cranking it by hand until the door and frame were forced apart just enough to unseat the dead bolt.
If they had such a tool, he had maybe a minute, tops, before they were inside.
Emptying his lungs, he paused for a millisecond, then squeezed the trigger.
It took all he had not to blink as the weapon jolted, and if he had, he would have missed the sight of his shot landing true, entering right below the man’s nose and, by the way the man dropped instantly, utterly destroying his medulla.
This drew the fire of the other men, but Tom was expecting that.
He withdrew his carbine and leaned clear of the window, pressing his back against the wall.
He trusted that the barrier he’d put there would protect him, so after taking a quick breath, he moved fast and positioned himself at the port again.
The Rogue Agent Page 16
