by Jon McGoran
A momentary break in the clouds revealed two black buses on a long straight road across the prairie. “That’s probably all of them,” Cooper said. The tension in the room dissipated just a little as everyone let out a breath.
Wall turned to Aram and whispered, “Is that good?”
Aram shrugged. “It means that they’re all going somewhere together. Probably to start the actual games. But it also means they’re not taking Agent Keen off by herself, which could have meant they had blown her cover. That would have been very bad.”
Cooper got on the phone with Greg Nichols and gave the order for the tac team to prepare for action.
Ressler and Navabi got ready, too. The tac team helicopter would pick them up on the way.
But the dot just kept moving across the screen. After ten minutes, someone made coffee.
Aram pulled up the photos of Corson and Yancy, and told everyone that Wall had identified them as the two guys operationally in charge. He also told Cooper that he hadn’t gotten any hits on them through facial recognition, but pulled up the files on Flynn and Boden.
The group was scanning them for any relevant information when the tracking dot stopped.
Aram acquired the GPS coordinates and searched for any previous mention of that location or anything near it. “Search of those GPS coordinates comes up blank. They’re in the middle of nowhere.”
Numbers started scrolling up the left side of Aram’s screen and Wall’s fingers attacked his keyboard.
“We have uplink feed,” Aram announced.
Cooper updated Nichols and the tac team while Navabi and Ressler resumed prepping.
A second column of numbers and letters began scrolling up the main screen. “We have downlink, too, sir,” Aram said.
The signal was live in both directions.
Wall pushed himself away from the keyboard and held up his hands. “We’re in.”
Aram’s screen suddenly crowded with eight more columns of characters. “It will take us a while to decipher the top video channels, but it looks like we have six video feeds and one data channel going out. And one data channel coming in.”
“That’s it then, right?” Ressler said. “If it’s a two-way signal, that means there’s bets coming in, right?”
“Nothing from Keen?” Cooper asked.
Aram shook his head. “No, sir.”
“How long has the feed been live?”
Aram checked the clock. “Two and a half minutes.”
“At five the tac team is supposed to go in regardless, right?” Ressler said.
Cooper watched the screens.
The cloud cover was still complete, but the transmitter was moving again, slowly. On foot.
Cooper took a deep breath. “Agent Keen said to wait for her signal.”
“What if there is no signal?” Ressler demanded. “We can’t see a goddamn thing. We have no idea what’s going on down there.”
Aram cleared his throat. “Um, we could bring the CIRRUS drone down below the cloud cover.”
“Without it being detected?”
Aram quickly tapped on his keyboard and checked some settings. After doing some quick math he shook his head. “No… We’d be too low.”
“What’s the time?” Navabi asked.
“Four minutes and forty-seven seconds.”
They stood there for thirteen seconds, staring at the screens and silently counting to themselves. Wall seemed to shrink into himself under the stress as he looked at each of their faces, one to the next.
“Five minutes,” said Ressler. “We have to go in.”
Cooper took another breath and let it out. “We wait.”
Chapter 47
As Corson finished his explanation, the four camera drones circled them slowly.
“I hope you understand what you are to do,” he said with a smirk. “Or that enough of you do so we have sufficient players left for rounds two and three.”
As he clapped his hands and rubbed them together, the drones flew higher. He looked at his watch and said, “Okay, we’ll meet you back here when you’re done. Or some of you at least. On my mark…”
Everyone stood there for a moment, and then he shouted, “Go!”
Boden took off first, running down the center of the winding road. Dudayev took off after him and a fraction of a second later, almost all of them followed. Okoye looked back at Keen questioningly as he brought up the rear. One of his eyes seemed slightly skew.
Keen fell in behind them at first, her side aching where Corson had kicked her. After a few steps, though, she turned and sprinted off to the left, laterally, around the low hills that surrounded the compound. The muscles in her side were on fire, but she ran flat out anyway, and after forty yards, she curved around to what she hoped was the rear of the compound. She charged up the side of the hill and slowed as she approached the top, staying low and getting a look at the place.
It was exactly as Corson described it—three double-wides in a U-shaped configuration. The center one had a smoke stack. Nothing was coming out of it, but now that she was closer, she could smell that distinctive ammonia stench of a meth lab. She hadn’t quite gone all the way to the back. To her right was one of the side units and to her left was the rear one, the lab.
Twenty feet away from her, a camera with a small antenna sat on a short tripod, looking down on the compound. An identical one perched on another hill on the far side of the compound.
She didn’t have the transmitter, but it was still encouraging to see ground-mounted cameras, that they weren’t relying solely on drones.
A dozen motorcycles were lined up along the far side of the compound. A lone gang member was tinkering with one of them, an assault rifle propped up against it.
To the right of him was the dirt road, and approaching along it, swiftly and apparently in silence, was Boden. Dudayev was just behind him. With the rest of the group farther back.
Boden sprinted straight at the gang member. He was almost there before the guy turned around and pulled a knife from a boot sheath. Boden went in low and took it from him, slicing viciously upward with it. An arc of blood followed the knife and the biker grabbed his face as blood gushed out of it.
Boden thrust the knife into the guy’s chest three times in rapid succession, and when the guy lowered his hands, Boden slashed across his throat.
Before anyone else had caught up with him, Boden was on the move. He seized the assault rifle and his legs pumped fast as he charged straight for the compound.
Just before he reached it, he turned, fiddled with the rifle for a moment and fired a spray of bullets into the ringers approaching from behind him.
Half a dozen of them went down, injured or dead.
Dudayev laughed.
Boden kept running. As soon as he disappeared behind the roofline, he was shooting again. In the dim morning light, Keen could see the windows of the double-wide to her right flickering with the muzzle flashes.
As the surviving ringers flooded the compound, Keen threw herself over the top of the hill and slid down the incline into the space behind the double-wides.
Through the first window she came to, she saw a gang member lying on the floor with a bubbling chest wound and a gun in his hand. She opened the window and pushed in the screen.
The guy on the floor gurgled and raised his gun as she climbed in, but then his hand dropped to the floor. He shook once and let out a long sigh.
His last breath.
Keen took the gun out of the dead man’s hands and kept moving.
Chapter 48
Keen moved silently into the next room, but it hardly mattered. The sound of gunfire and screams from outside would have drowned out the worst she could do. The floor of the room was covered with sleeping bags and air mattresses. It was empty except for two bodies: the Kenyan woman, Ebuya, and a biker, both stabbed multiple times. At first she thought the biker was one of the Cossacks, but his patches were different. Then she recognized him as one of the other rin
gers.
She opened the door to a third room, the noise growing louder the closer she got to the lab. In front of her, one of the Cossacks was holding Masri, the one-eyed Iraqi woman, up against the wall. He had one hand locked around her throat and the other one grasping a hunting knife.
Masri’s face was purple and her feet were four inches off the floor.
Keen almost yelled, “Freeze,” a misstep that could have cost her life and the operation.
As she bit the words back, the Cossack drove his knife up under Masri’s ribs, hard. To the hilt.
Her one eye bulged and she shuddered.
Keen thought the Cossack hadn’t seen her, but he whipped the blade out of Masri’s chest and turned, poised to throw it at her.
Without even thinking, she had already raised the gun.
Now she pulled the trigger, filling the small room with sound and light, obliterating the Cossack’s throat. He dropped the knife, took a step backward, and fell to the floor, thrashing and gurgling, then dead.
She hurried through yet another door, and found herself in the gap between the two trailers. Plastic sheeting was draped haphazardly over the top, held up with some kind of makeshift tent-pole.
She opened the door to the lab module just wide enough for one eye and the barrel of the gun.
The room inside was a shambles. Tables were upended. The air was filled with eye-burning toxic fumes. The walls were spattered with blood, and the floor was littered with bodies.
In the middle of the room was a metal cabinet, the door open wide. Inside it were two packages of white powder. Only two. That was close.
She darted in and grabbed one, then hurried back to the door. As she was about to slip outside, the door on the far side of the lab opened up and Okoye entered. He staggered for a moment, his face twitching before he shook his head and it stopped. He went to the cabinet and picked up the last package.
As he did, he saw her, looked into her eyes.
Then Keen noticed someone else, another ringer, coming up behind him. She saw the trail of tear-shaped tattoos coming down from one of his cold, sociopath eyes and she recognized him: a gang-banger named Ramirez. He came up behind Okoye and raised a vicious-looking knife, its blade already slick with blood.
Okoye flinched when he saw her gun leveled almost at his face. He ducked as Keen pulled the trigger and hit Ramirez in the chest, knocking him backward.
Okoye, surprised that he was still bullet-free, turned to see the dead man sprawled on the floor, then looked back at Keen. He tipped his head in thanks and she pointed toward the door she was exiting through.
“Come on,” she said.
Chapter 49
Okoye nodded and followed her. As they stepped outside, Keen looked out through the narrow gap between the two units. The dirt was wet with red and littered with bodies.
Together, they charged up the hill, away from the compound, each clutching their kilos of meth.
To their left, Keen could see two ringers lying dead on the slope she had run down ten minutes earlier. To their right was the camera on the tripod, slowly panning in their direction.
As they crested the hill, they paused. One of the quadcopters circled around them, rotating as it sank lower, keeping them in its view.
For a moment, she wondered if it was government issue, and if, with no signal from her, this was the first wave of the tac team sweeping in to shut everything down and extract her. For a guilty moment, she hoped they would, even though she hadn’t activated the transmitter. But she had told them not to. She trusted that they wouldn’t. She clenched her jaw, trying to find a deeper reserve of inner strength.
She had told them not to come until she sent the signal, and they weren’t. Because they trusted her. Not just her judgment, but her strength and her ability to survive whatever was being thrown at her.
They had faith in her. She needed to have faith, too.
* * *
The drone rose to look at the carnage behind them.
The only movement below was one badly injured ringer limping toward the dirt road and the rendezvous point. One hand was clamped over a bleeding abdominal wound; the other one clutched a package just like theirs. Then two others appeared, running at him from different directions. One moved fast and low, the other was practically shambling, his right leg drenched in blood. The quicker one closed on the man with the package, drove a knife into his back and took the package, then simply kept running.
The man with the leg wound paused for a moment, as if he was deciding whether or not to give up, then he ran as best he could after the other one.
Keen and Okoye started running, too, down the other side of the hill and back to the rendezvous point. The clouds had grown even darker, and as they ran, a volley of fat raindrops pelted the ground around them, rolling into little balls of mud. But it stopped.
As they rounded the next hill, the buses came into view forty yards away, surrounded by a crowd of ringers, many of them bloodied.
Keen wondered what it said about her that she was saddened to see Boden and Dudayev among them. She kind of hoped they had been killed.
Corson and Yancy stood off to the side with half a dozen PMCs.
The other two camera drones circled high in the sky.
As Keen and Okoye approached the buses, the man with the bloody thigh emerged from the road leading from the compound, running unsteadily out into the open, between them and the rendezvous point. It was Flynn, the guy she had provoked into shoving her when she’d tried to take the transmitter from Yancy.
His eyes were wild, bright blue in the middle of a face smeared with blood. When they looked at her, she saw recognition and hatred.
He looked at the packages in their hands. Then he charged at them.
The camera drones circled closer, buzzing like insects.
Keen raised the gun in her hand and shouted, “Get back.”
Flynn veered away from her, toward Okoye, and she said it again. “Get back!”
Okoye braced his legs, prepared to fight.
She still didn’t know what Okoye knew about her. He had helped her but she had helped him too, so they were even as far as that went. Still, they were allies of a sort— and that couldn’t be a bad thing in a game like this.
Keen two-handed the gun in front of her, for control and emphasis. The man coming at them didn’t slow down for a second. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left, but even amid all that carnage, she didn’t want to just kill him.
She took a chance and aimed at his legs. She pulled the trigger and he went down, tumbling into the dirt, clutching what had been his good leg. It glistened red just above the knee. He writhed and moaned, rolling around on the ground.
Keen grabbed Okoye by the elbow, and pulled him along. Flynn let out an animal scream and lunged at them both, but he fell short. It seemed like the last of whatever fight he had left in him. As they jogged toward the rendezvous point, he began to weep, in pain and frustration, maybe in fear.
Keen couldn’t help wondering what had led him there, to that moment, to that situation. How many bad decisions and bad breaks had led Flynn to think the Dead Ring was his best option. She had to fight the urge to stop and help him—to save him. At that moment she wanted to do whatever she could to shut the whole nightmare down. But there was nothing she could do. Not then. Anything she tried would simply cost her life and the success of the operation.
So instead she kept jogging, her face a cold mask of indifference.
As she and Okoye joined the others, Yancy did a quick headcount and nodded at Corson. “That’s eighteen.”
Corson nodded toward the PMCs and then turned to address the eighteen ringers standing there clutching their packages of methamphetamine.
“Congratulations on surviving the first round of the Dead Ring,” he said.
Four of the PMCs trotted off down the dirt road. Meanwhile Yancy walked over to Flynn. Two camera drones swooped out of the sky in unison then split, one follo
wing Yancy, the other following the quartet trotting down the road.
“Inside each of those packages is a key, which you will need for the next round, tomorrow,” Corson said. “Go ahead and open your packages, dump out the contents and retrieve your key.”
Keen looked around. A couple of the ringers were staring at the packages in their hands like they’d just been reunited with the true love of their lives.
“If you’re partial to this stuff,” Corson said, “now’s the time to take a taste, but you are not bringing it onto the bus.”
Flynn pounded the earth with his fist, screaming a stream of obscenities. He seemed oblivious to Yancy now standing over him, as if despite his rage and anguish, he had completely accepted the inevitability of his fate. The camera drone slowly circled them, ten feet off the ground. Of course they were broadcasting it.
Yancy casually aimed his rifle at Flynn’s head and pulled the trigger twice, silencing him.
The troop transport that had been parked next to the RV drove past them and toward the dirt road. The drone rose up into the air and followed. Yancy returned to his spot behind Corson.
Keen and Okoye exchanged a glance as the men around them tore open their packages, spilling the powder and white rocks onto the dirt at their feet. White clouds of toxic dust floated away on the breeze as they fished out their keys.
A handful hesitated, but only one actually took a taste, a wiry weasel of a man with a swastika tattoo on his neck. He put a small rock in his mouth, grimacing as he crunched it in his mouth and swallowed it down.
Keen tore open her package and dumped the contents onto the ground. Okoye did the same so there were two cascades of white rocks and two small clouds of dust. She stepped away from it, making sure she didn’t breathe any dust. Then she reached in with two fingers and picked up her key. It was small and chunky, like a padlock key, with a red plastic cover over the grip.
She wiped the white dust off of it with her fingers, then rubbed her fingers on the ground to get the meth off of them. Okoye did the same.
As she straightened up, the sound of automatic weapons echoed from the compound, two short bursts, then two more. Everyone stopped and looked down the dirt road.
