by Dale Mayer
Brandon and Stone stood beside her, watching her. She tried to ignore them as she cleaned off Bullard’s face and chest. He did look drugged. His cheeks sagged, and his neck was nowhere near the same thick imposing firmness like when he was upright. Something was off. She’d already run as many tests as she could and had written down the stats. She had already spoken with Levi and Ice, had a call in to Dave. She could only do so much. She checked her watch and said, “Nineteen hours. We only have to wait nineteen more hours.”
But before they said a word, she already knew what they would say. Bullard might not have nineteen hours. Then her phone rang, and she smiled as she donned her headset and hooked up the caller to the wall screen for a conference call. “Dave, we found him.”
Dave’s relief came through with a shout of joy. “How is he?”
“He’s unconscious. We found a head injury, but we’re not seeing much else.” She explained where Bullard had been found.
“I told him not to put out the word he was looking to hire local help. That’s never a good thing. It brings all the scum out of the woodwork. You’ll never figure out which ones are good and which ones aren’t.”
“I know,” Kasha said. “The other thing is, the pilot said he will be back at 8:00 a.m. And we’re worried because we think Bullard’s been drugged.”
“Right, Bullard and his bloody schedules. He said we weren’t allowed to deviate from them.”
“So he told you that too?” she asked in relief.
He nodded. “Yes, he always does. But we must make decisions sometimes that go against what he wants. He might be angry when he wakes up, but that’s a whole lot better than him not waking up at all because we didn’t call for help.”
“So what should I do?” she asked.
“What do the men think?”
Brandon stepped forward so Dave could see him on the screen. “Hi, Dave. Brandon here. As far as I can see, Bullard’s got a head injury, and they’ve given him drugs to keep him sedated. I don’t know if they were painkillers or just knockout drugs or worse. His pulse is strong and steady. However, he needs to sleep off the drugs or purge them from his system.”
“The head injury is not as easy to write off,” Stone said. “It would be nice if we had an X-ray machine to see if he’s got a skull fracture or concussion. As you well know, a bleed on the brain is very serious.”
Dave’s expression became worried. “Yes, indeed. Brain bleeds are the worst. I’m not sure we should fly him anywhere because of that possibility.”
Brandon had to consider that. “We’re not going very high in altitude. So I don’t think,” he said cautiously, “that should be a problem.”
“But we don’t know that, do we? If Bullard’s sleeping it off, and there’s no change in his condition, I suggest we leave him where he is. Keep an eye on him, set up an IV and get fluids flowing through his system to flush out those drugs.”
“There aren’t any such supplies here,” Kasha said. “I’ve been looking.” She turned to look around in the cabinets. “I’ll give this place another good once-over, but we haven’t been here long enough to stock up the medical bay.”
“Of course it doesn’t come with a standard first aid kit.” Dave ran fingers through his hair and said, “Short of having activated charcoal about, I can think of two homeopathic solutions. Why not immerse him in a coffee bath? Surely coffee is there. That’s supposed to pull out toxins, even drugs. If not coffee, look for Epsom salts. If Bullard’s running a fever, put him in a cool-water bath. If he’s chilled, make it a warm-water solution.”
“We’ll try that. A warm bath will heat him up even if we find no Epsom salts and drink our coffee instead,” Kasha said.
“I’ll call you back in about an hour. Let me know if there’s a change in his condition before then.” He clicked off, and the screen went blank.
Kasha looked to Brandon and said, “Why don’t you give me a hand, and we’ll go through each cabinet down here.” She added, “Bullard thought there might be squatters on the property as we found a lot of household stuff when we first arrived. I don’t know what we might find now.”
Stone stepped forward and said, “You guys check the left. I’ll check the right.”
Splitting up, they carefully went through each of the cabinets. This medic station was lined in them. With the cook sitting patiently beside Bullard and with Brandon following her, Kasha moved steadily down the wall. “There’s everything in here but medical equipment.”
“Which is to be expected. It all should be in one spot, wherever it is.” He pulled out several fire extinguishers, checked the dates, realized they were well past the use-by date—as in over ten years ago—and put them back in the cabinet with a frown. “I know this building resembles something from the days of castles and moats, but exactly how old is this property, and how long was it left empty?”
“This main building is over eighty years old,” she said. “They don’t build them like this anymore. It was supposedly empty for over five years, when the former owner died and had no family to pass this down to, but, as you can see, it has signs of being recently inhabited.” She kept moving down the cabinets. She found everything from weapons and gun cleaning supplies to more equipment to create and build their own ammo. Everything but the needed medical supplies. She turned to Brandon who was still at the cabinet full of ammunition-making equipment.
She asked, “Why are you so fascinated with this?”
“I’m always interested in things that go boom in the night,” he half joked.
They continued through the rest of the cabinets until they had searched the entire ER room. The room itself was way bigger than the main floor of most houses. In fact, it was bigger than a six-car garage. He shook his head. “It’s massive down here.”
She nodded. “It’s one of the reasons Bullard really loved this place. He said this floor alone had so much potential as a war room and command central, and he wanted to set it up right.”
“I can see that. But he forgot to clean out the human snake pit first.”
She laughed. “Bullard lives for those kinds of snakes, remember?”
Brandon looked at her and smiled.
It was one of the first natural smiles she’d seen out of him. So far, he’d been edgy and hard, almost angry. But now he was laughing, joking and carefree. It looked good on him. She smiled back and said, “There’s a room over here. Let’s check it out.”
She led the way. As soon as she opened the door, she heard the spit—a gun with a silencer—but had no time to react. Brandon tossed her to the ground, a hand beneath her head to protect it. Even as he landed beside her, Brandon was already rolling and firing. She knew the others would hear their defending gunfire as none of them were using silencers. She had pulled out both her guns but couldn’t see anything. What the hell just happened? This interior side room was used for storage.
She scrambled to her feet and crept along the outer edge of the room. She didn’t dare call out. When she heard another spit, she flattened to the floor again.
That spit was followed by several other hard spits and then a grunt. She knew somebody was hit. She stayed where she was, the darkness all encompassing. As her eyes adjusted, she saw Brandon detach himself from the shadows and slip around the corner.
“All clear,” he called out. “He’s down.”
She raced to his side. “Can you see who it is?” she asked.
He pulled out his cell phone and turned on the flashlight, holding it to the side of the man’s face. As the light shone, she could hear Stone’s running footsteps. “It’s okay,” she called out both on her headset to notify Merk and Harrison and loud enough for Stone to hear her. “Brandon got him.”
Stone stopped when he saw the man on the floor. “Did you kill him?”
Brandon looked up and nodded. “Sorry.”
“Too bad. If we’d had him alive, we could have questioned him.”
Kasha’s hand when to her headset. “Merk’
s coming. Harrison’s staying on point.”
They all stared down at the white man. He was dressed like a soldier, in fatigues and camouflage gear.
Brandon bent down and searched his pockets. He pulled out a wallet and tossed it to Stone and then checked through the rest of his pockets. “I sure hope he wasn’t active military. This had better not be an operation we stepped into,” Brandon snapped.
“No, it isn’t,” Harrison said. “There’s no name on the fatigues, and the styling’s old. This is Army Surplus–looking stuff. He might have been military at one time. But he’s likely a merc now.”
Nothing else was in his pockets except a lighter and a couple coins and three keys. Brandon didn’t know what the keys were for, but he dumped them into Stone’s hand before heading for the dead man’s boots. He took them off and searched the inside, one by one.
Kasha watched him curiously. “Why the boots?”
“Because a lot of men on missions keep a photograph or a letter from their loved ones there. It’s for good luck,” he said shortly.
She hadn’t heard that before. It was fascinating to consider. In this case, the man didn’t have anything in his boots. But when Brandon pulled off one sock, sure enough a simple piece of paper fell out. She picked it up and opened it. “It’s got Bullard’s name on it and the address. Well, rather the location. It’s not like there’s an address here.”
The piece of paper was handed around, but there was nothing else helpful to be gained from it.
“Even with fingerprints, these freelance merc types wouldn’t be in anybody’s database when they’re working small villages and abandoned properties, like this guy was. He’s way too small potatoes and under the radar,” Brandon said as he pulled off the other sock. When he found nothing, he put both socks back on and then slid the boots atop.
Again she couldn’t help asking, “Why are you putting his boots back on?”
“He died the way he lived,” Brandon said, his voice curt. “He was a soldier, one way or another, and they like to die with their boots on.”
She stepped back, understanding it was a code among soldiers, but to her it made more sense to take off the boots. The man would be heavy enough without putting those things on him as well. But when Brandon lifted him with the ease of a man carrying a child, she realized weight was hardly an issue.
He turned to look at her and said, “Where do you want him?”
Stone stepped up and said, “Before we take him to the fridge or cooler or call the local authorities, let’s ask your cook if she knows him.”
Kasha brightened. “Put him on one of the stretchers out here.”
As they turned to the door, Merk had joined them with a gurney. They laid the man down on the surface and threw a sheet over him. Merk and Stone pushed the dead man to join Bullard in the war room. A quick conversation between Kasha and Tahlia and then a look at the dead man underneath the sheet had determined that the cook did not know the armed intruder.
Merk left Stone in the war room to relieve Harrison on the rooftop.
Brandon raised his eyebrows at Kasha’s translation, turned and whispered to her, “That look of surprise on Tahlia’s face could be at seeing her first dead man, though I doubt that with her village full of bad guys.”
“You still think she’s lying to us, don’t you?”
Brandon nodded as he walked back into the room where he’d shot the man, and Kasha followed. “What are you looking for?”
“I want to know what he was doing in here. I want to know why he was here. I want to know what the hell he thought he was doing in the holding. And how the hell he got inside.”
“You didn’t buy the story from the others that they were looking for work?”
“Maybe. In a way, yes, especially if Bullard put out the call. Hundreds of them will be coming. The problem is, this guy was inside, and the only other person inside was your cook.” He turned to look at Kasha. “And why didn’t the heat sensors pick up his presence earlier?”
“It doesn’t work on this floor,” she admitted. “Bullard knew that, but we didn’t have time to fix it.”
“Well, that’s not good.”
*
Brandon didn’t mean it to come out that way. But, being in a country like this—where betrayal and deceit seemed to be served at breakfast and lunch and dinner—it was a little hard to trust anyone. His heart had damn near come to a full stop when he’d heard the gunfire. It had been all he could do to force her to the floor and out of the way of the bullet. He’d felt a tug on his shoulder as it had passed him, but thankfully it hadn’t done any damage.
“Why back here? How many floors are above us? Four? He was in here for a reason.” Brandon stared at the crates stacked around this smaller room. “What’s in this stuff?”
“No idea.” She shrugged. “We didn’t have time to open up the crates and inventory this stuff before. We were planning to come back in a couple weeks. We stayed longer than planned as it was for our first visit. This was supposed to be a quick trip in and out, but …”
Brandon turned to study where the man had been hiding, finding a corner space hidden by boxes with a pallet on the floor, a canteen, beef jerky and nuts. He shook the canteen and heard nothing. “He’s been here for a while. There’s all kinds of computer equipment out in the open in this room.”
“Computers were everywhere when we arrived. But older versions with no logical setup, just a jumbled mess. We shoved it all in here so we could set up our gear properly.”
He turned to face her. “Do we know for sure the previous owner is gone?”
She frowned. “No. It’s not as if I saw a death certificate. But, like I said, it was supposed to be empty for close to five years. But, when we saw all this stuff, we assumed a squatter had been here.” She took a deep breath and added, “We did have trouble the first day we were here. We had a group of men come by and threaten Bullard. They wanted him to get the hell out of here.”
Brandon stared at her. “And you’re just mentioning this now?”
“I thought you knew already,” she protested. “Besides, Bullard just laughed it off.”
Brandon shook his head, pissed. “Did anyone tell Ice?”
She frowned “Bullard did. At least I think he did.”
Brandon had to wonder. Maybe Bullard didn’t tell Ice everything after all.
Chapter 4
Kasha checked the time. “Dave will be calling in soon. And I need to see how Bullard is.”
Brandon nodded and followed her into the ER room off the main war room. After noting Bullard’s vitals on a clipboard, she watched over her boss. He showed no signs of coming out of his drugged stupor. She wanted to get him home, but he’d been very specific about not changing the flight schedule. She hated that. That left the onus on her to follow his instructions, but, if things went bad, she didn’t want something to happen to him because she couldn’t decide for herself. Her phone rang as she sat at Bullard’s side. She set it up for a video conference again. “Hey, Dave. Right on time.”
“How is he?” Dave’s total focus was on the unconscious man on the stretcher.
“No change so far, yet his vitals remain strong. Which is good, right?”
Dave nodded. “I would think so.”
“Although we did find needle marks on the inside of his elbow, where he was injected with drugs. Nothing else would explain his state.”
“The trouble is, we don’t know what drugs were used or how much was given him or if it was just one drug or a cocktail. All those details matter.”
“Right. And we haven’t even gotten Bullard into a warm bath, as our search for medical supplies ended when we found an armed intruder, who Brandon killed in self-defense. And now we probably shouldn’t move Bullard from the central war room to any bathtub in this place. Although his body is no longer as chilled.”
Dave sighed. “I’m sending the plane early. The pilot will be there around 4:00 a.m.”
Fourteen hours
to go. She grinned. “Perfect.”
“I see the five of you. Where are the others?”
“Merk and Harrison are surveying the area. Keeping watch.”
“Do you think you’re under attack?”
“Not yet, but we suspect it’s coming.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure what’s going on with the mercs in town, but remember the trouble we had before you and I left Bullard alone here? It’s quite possible something is brewing locally. Maybe nobody wanted Bullard to have the place.”
“Or maybe somebody was using the place and wants their base back,” Brandon added. “The squatter’s computer equipment, even if not up to our caliber, would be expensive to replace for a small faction far away from any cities and tech companies. Or they could want the information they have stored on it.”
“Who knows what else is here that they left behind,” Kasha said. “And we’ve had too many interruptions to inventory the place properly.”
“As a stronghold, it’s a nice setup,” Dave said. “I can send a team of men if you need them.”
“We should plan to leave a team here until Bullard is healthy and a full security system is properly installed here.”
“Okay, I’ll send four men on the plane.” He smirked. “I know just who to send.”
“That’s a good idea. Send some rations for them too. It looks like the kitchen has been cleaned out.”
“Of course it has.” Dave’s voice was resigned. “It seems like we’re always up against renegades and thieves.”
“We could’ve gone anywhere in the world, but this is where Bullard wanted to be.”
“I think it was more a case of the rules were a whole lot less restricted there,” Dave said drily.
“True enough.” She hung up to find Brandon waiting for her, one eyebrow raised, and Stone nearby.
“Dave’s sending the plane a little earlier, depending on the weather conditions. He doesn’t like the drug’s effect on Bullard.”
Brandon checked Bullard’s pulse. “The problem is, they could have given him a horse tranquilizer, and he’ll be knocked out for days.”
