She put a stop to that with a single suppressed round through the crown of his head, then checked the first man she’d shot. He was well and thoroughly dead. She suddenly found herself standing in the middle of the carnage with no idea what to do next. Should she check on the homeowner in the basement? Should she rush out the door? No, she needed to touch base with her partner.
“Shani, talk to me. Inside is secure. What’s your status?”
When there was no answer, she repeated herself, turning closer to her mic. “Shani? Barb for Shani.”
When the reply came, it was a hoarse whisper. A croak that chilled Barb to her core.
“I’m shot.”
52
Barb’s mind raced. She ran toward the front door but caught herself before she could charge blindly out into the open. Then her dad’s voice was in her ear. Recalling that her mic was voice-activated, she realized he’d not only heard Shani’s comment but had likely heard all the gunfire too.
“Barb! Stop and listen to me a moment!”
She did as he asked, heart pounding, flattening herself against the wall by the door. “Okay, Dad. I hear you.”
“Stay where you are. I’m trying to raise the drone team. I don’t want you moving around until we have a picture of what’s going on. Shani, how bad are you hit?”
“I think it’s bad.”
Hearing the desperation in her new friend’s voice, Barb glanced out the front door. She had a significant advantage in terms of optics. If there were men concealed in the darkness, the thermal feature of her ENVG-B should pick them up. She threw her rifle up and stood in the shattered doorway. She saw dead bodies scattered on the porch and in the driveway, all of them still putting off heat, some of them still moving. One moaned, trying to crawl away from the house.
“I’ve got wounded outside the front door,” Barb said. “I’m going to finish them.”
“No!” Shani groaned. “I’m one of those wounded.”
Then Barb spotted her among the dead men, just feet beyond the porch steps. Without a thought to the threats that may still be lurking in the darkness, she rushed to Shani’s side and knelt. Conor would be fussing in her ear if he knew, but he didn’t. At least, he didn’t until he connected with the drone team and they relayed their findings to him.
“Dammit, Barb! Are you outside the house?” he bellowed in her ear.
She didn’t answer him. She was fighting to get her injured teammate inside the shelter of the lake house. Shani was dead weight, groaning and weak, damp with her own blood. She couldn’t stand. Barb took hold of the grab handle on Shani’s vest and tugged her up the steps and into the living room.
“I was coming to help you,” Shani said. “I was going to engage your shooter from the door. I got hit.”
Barb clenched her jaw. “It must have been the bastard who lives here. He was the only one firing in that direction. Came up from the basement with his own gun. Got his dumb ass shot for it, too.”
There was a voice in Barb’s earpiece. Conor on the radio again. “Drone relayed that someone carried a body inside the house. That you, Barb? Talk to me?”
“I’ve got Shani. I’m checking her injuries.”
“Drone shows two men escaped. One might be injured, moving slow and headed to the dock. Other is moving away from the house, going west through the woods.”
Unable to see what she was doing in the awkward headgear, Barb ripped the helmet from her head and dropped it beside her. She pulled a tiny flashlight from her pocket and clenched it between her teeth. She could see clearly now and didn’t like what she found. Shani’s left leg, from her knee to her waistline, was saturated in bright red blood.
“Oh fuck,” Barb muttered, again forgetting that her dad could hear her over the voice-activated radio.
“What is it, Barb?”
Barb tore a pair of trauma shears from a pouch on the back of her belt. She cut through Shani’s pants, then through the thermal base layer she wore beneath them. She found the hole just over the leg but below the waistline, near the cleft where her leg joined her torso. Barb ripped her blowout kit from a pouch she carried alongside the shears. She carried an Israeli bandage among the gear in the kit. She tore it open and pressed it against the wound.
“Barb!” Conor said sharply. “Talk to me, dammit!”
“She took a round below her vest, forward of the left hip. Bullet is still in there. There’s blood everywhere.”
“You have to stop that bleeding, Barb.”
“On it, Dad.
“I’m coming to you, baby girl. We’ve got two hostiles on the loose that need to be stopped. I’ll deal with them. You stay on that bleeding.”
“I don’t need a shooter, Dad. I need a doctor. You stay there. Send Doc Marty.”
There was no response.
“Send Doc Marty or she’s going to die!” Barb hissed. “There’s no room for a tourniquet and pressure isn’t stopping this!”
“Acknowledged. He’s leaving now.”
53
Doc Marty was listening to the radio chatter through his earpiece and was already getting his gear together before the conversation was over. In going through Kamil’s cabin, he found two sets of car keys. He ran outside and was able to match one set to a tan minivan. He inserted the key in the ignition, turned it, and the engine roared to life. Someone must have been starting it often enough to keep the battery charged. The gas gauge showed a quarter tank of fuel.
He raced back inside and Conor shoved a scrap of paper at him.
“It’s the address. I wrote down directions from my GPS.”
Doc nodded and took the paper.
“Go!” Conor said.
Doc was already moving, leaping the steps and hopping into the open door of the van. He dropped it in gear, punched the gas, and the vehicle rocketed backward. Doc worked the steering wheel furiously. He scrubbed a tree and lost a side mirror on the narrow, winding path. Emerging onto the paved road, he spun the wheel, and the awkward vehicle yawed, skidding until it was pointed in the right direction. Doc hit the gas again, barreling away from the resort.
Watching the lights disappear through the trees, Conor keyed his radio. “Barb, you there?”
“I’m here.” He could hear the stress in her voice.
“Doc Marty is on his way. He’s in a vehicle. He should be there in a minute or two. Not long at all. You hold on, okay?”
“Doing my best.”
“I know you are, sweetie. Just keep her plugged until Doc gets there, then let me know what he says.”
“Got it.”
Conor whipped out his sPad and hit Ricardo’s contact, who answered immediately.
“What’s going on there, Conor?”
“Shani is hit bad. I’ve got Doc Marty on the way but she’s going to need more than that. Any chance of a medevac to Whiteman AFB?”
“One moment.”
Conor could hear Ricardo speaking to someone in the background, presumably Trent. He was back on the phone quickly. “We’ll make it happen, somehow. Can you get her back to the LZ where we dropped you?”
“Affirmative,” Conor replied.
“We’ll scramble someone as fast as we can, Conor. What about everything else?”
“Just mopping up. Keep the drone on us as long as you can.”
“We’ll do our best.”
They ended the call and Conor immediately contacted the drone team again. “I need an update.”
“One hostile is boarding a kayak at the water’s edge,” came the neutral reply. “The hostile on foot appears to be returning to the resort. I’d recommend you prepare to engage.”
“Roger that,” Conor said.
He didn’t want to wait, he wanted to fight. He got an idea and left his detainees in Kamil’s cabin for a moment, returning to the restaurant. He’d seen something when he took out the dishwasher that might be of use. He slipped into the kitchen and played a flashlight around the room, spotting the big walk-in freezer at the bac
k of the room. Surely with no power, it wouldn’t be cold enough in there to kill them.
Conor opened the door and peered inside. The smell nearly knocked him on his ass. There must have been more food in there than they’d been able to eat when the power went out. Some of it had thawed and gone bad. The beam of Conor’s light revealed rotting fish and blackened packets of ground beef. He wondered why the men hadn’t cleaned the freezer out but he supposed there was no point really. The freezer did a decent job of sealing the odor in.
He smiled. Once they had to spend some time in there, these men were soon going to wish they’d gone to the trouble of cleaning it out.
“Field trip!” Conor announced, bursting back into Kamil’s cabin. “I’ve arranged new accommodations and I’m sure you’ll find them to your liking.
The prisoners, a handful of men sporting injuries ranging from cuts and scrapes to broken bones and rattled skulls, looked doubtful. One by one, Conor cut the bonds from their feet and walked them to the restaurant. With their eyes covered, they couldn’t see where they were going until the smell hit them.
“Knock a crow off a corpse, wouldn’t it?” Conor said with a grin.
Despite their defiant postures, the walk-in was breaking them down. Each time he added a new man, the other occupants looked a little worse. When he added the last man, Conor broke down and removed the tape from their mouths. They all looked ready to puke and the last thing he needed was the men choking to death on their own vomit. The walls were thick enough they would muffle the men’s cries if they decided to call out.
When he slammed the door on them, Conor located a screwdriver and shoved it through the padlock slot on the door. That would prevent anyone from escaping, even if they reached the emergency latch on the inside.
Outside, Conor made another call to the drone team. “What’s the status of the hostile on foot?”
“He’s about halfway to your location,” the operator replied. “He’s left the woods and is using the road.”
“Acknowledged.”
Conor replaced the sPad in its pouch and keyed the mic on his radio. “Conor for Barb.”
“I’m here, Dad.”
“You holding up?”
“Anxious for Doc to get here.”
“It shouldn’t be long. I need you to give him a message when he gets there.”
“Go ahead.”
“Home base is arranging a medevac. They’ll pick her up at the same LZ where we were dropped off. I don’t have an ETA on that, though. He needs to stabilize her, then start moving her toward the LZ. You guys stay on your toes in case that chopper draws eyes. Got it?”
“Got it, Dad.”
“And one more thing. The drone team says there’s an injured hostile headed toward the boats. He’s probably going to try to get away on the water.”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“Then we’ll talk later, baby girl. You be careful.”
“You too, Dad.”
Conor switched a fresh mag into his rifle and set about preparing for his guest.
54
True to Conor’s promise, Doc Marty was on the scene in no time. Barb heard the screech of tires and headlights swept across the open front door. It was an unusual sight in this world of foot and horse travel, but she was thankful for his haste, however it came about.
“Doc is here,” she whispered to Shani. “Hold on.”
Shani nodded but said nothing.
Barb couldn’t tell if she was growing weak, conserving her energy, or simply struggling to fight the pain. There were pounding footsteps in the driveway and Barb called to Doc. “In here!”
Now that she was speaking more, Barb turned her radio off the voice-activated setting. Her dad didn’t need to hear every word she said.
Doc rushed through the door, his trauma pack in one hand and his rifle in the other. “What have we got?” He dumped his gear and dropped to his knees alongside Shani. He yanked on a headlamp and powered it up, the harsh LED flooding the scene with white light.
Barb had preferred the scene under the beam of her weaker light. Suddenly it seemed that there was much more blood. Too much blood for someone to lose and still survive. “The wound is below my hand. It’s the only one but it hit something serious. The blood is pumping with her heart and I don’t know what else to do.”
Doc snapped on a pair of nitrile gloves and took over the pressure on the wound. Barb scooted away and watched as he took a glance beneath the dressing. He frowned, a flash of concern, as he evaluated the situation.
“Is it bad, Doc?” Shani asked.
Doc smiled. “I think you already know the answer to that. Losing blood is always bad, Shani. I’m going to try to clamp it off. There’ll be some pressure while I’m feeling for the bleeder.”
Shani grinned weakly. “Is that ‘pressure’ anything like the ‘little pinch’ nurses promise before they gouge the fuck out of you?”
“Pretty much,” Doc admitted.
While she was smiling, Doc slipped a gloved finger beneath the dressing and inserted it into the wound. Shani jerked with the pain, gritting her teeth. Barb scooted closer, ready to offer comfort, but Shani made eye contact with her and shook her head. She wanted no comfort.
“Got it.” Doc looked off in the distance as his brain visualized the anatomy he felt beneath his fingers. He leaned over and extracted a hemostat from his trauma kit. Moving quickly, he removed his finger from the wound and used the hemostat to clamp off the bleeding vessel. He watched it for a moment to make sure the forceps were effective, then tore open the top of his trauma kit and began removing other supplies.
The sound of footsteps on the basement stairs drew everyone’s attention. Barb threw up her rifle and aimed it. “The family is in the basement,” she said. “I think a man was hit. I’m pretty sure it was one of his rounds that accidentally caught Shani.”
“Check on them,” Doc said.
Barb looked at Shani as if seeking confirmation that she was okay with being left alone. Shani nodded.
“Hello?” came a quavering female voice from the basement entrance.
Barb couldn’t see a head yet but replied to the voice. “It’s okay. The bad men are gone.”
“Can someone please check on my husband? He’s alive but he’s been shot.”
“Give me one second,” Barb replied. “I have one more thing to take care of first.”
She replaced her bump helmet on her head and ran to the sliding glass door that led onto the deck. She unlocked it, slid it open, and moved outside, dropping her nightvision back into place. She scanned the water’s edge. Sure enough, the thermal picked up the figure of a man paddling frantically away from the shore.
Barb’s optic had a scale that helped her range distances to man-sized targets. Since the man was sitting in a kayak, she used half the scale, measuring from the top of his head to where she thought his waist to be. That gave her the rough distance of her target. Once she knew the distance, she could calculate the drop of her bullet at that range.
The optic that coupled with her helmet offered no adjustment for this distance, just a scale for estimated holdover. That would have to do. It was a battle rifle, not a precision rifle. Dropping to her knees, she rested the thick, suppressed barrel on the deck rail. She flipped the selector to full auto and positioned the reticle on the glowing man.
Barb squeezed the trigger and fired a short burst. It was close enough to splash the startled man but not close enough to hit him or his kayak. Barb grinned. She had him dialed in.
The man increased his furious paddling but there was no way he could move fast enough. He was trapped on open water with no cover. Barb squeezed the trigger again and her aim was true. She heard rounds shattering plastic and slapping meat. In her optic, she saw the man jerking and struggling, then his boat began to settle lower in the water. The paddler slumped to the side and the offset weight rolled the boat. She watched for a moment and he didn’t resurface.
Barb sto
od, flipped her optic out of the way, and returned to the basement stairs where the woman waited nervously. “Where’s he hit?”
“His arm, but I think he hit his head in the fall.” The woman moved down the steps, one hand on the rail, the other holding a flashlight.
The stairs took a turn at the bottom. Barb followed her around a corner and found a large extended family huddled around the fallen man. He lay on the tiled floor in a pool of lantern light. Someone held a bandage against his arm and his head was propped on a floral sofa pillow.
“Are you a doctor?” one of the kids asked.
Barb shook her head. “No, I’m usually the reason people need a doctor.”
That comment, fully indicative of Barb’s lack of bedside manner, made nearly everyone turn as a unit and stare at her.
“Sorry, I just mean no, I’m not a doctor.”
“What the hell are you?” an old man on a cane asked. “What’s going on around here? I need some answers and somebody better start talking.”
Rolling with the earlier story that this was a law-enforcement action and they were police, Barb fell back on that. “I’m sorry, I can’t say a whole lot. There have been some attacks around the lake, and these men were responsible. We got a tip they were headed here tonight, but we weren’t able to act fast enough to stop them.”
The group didn’t appear satisfied with the explanation but didn’t know what else to say. Intent on keeping things moving, Barb went to the man’s side and knelt down, laying her rifle in front of her. “May I?”
The teenager holding the bandage on the injured man’s arm moved to the side to give her room. Barb raised the dishtowel they were using as a bandage. There was a ragged flesh wound where a rifle round had taken out a chunk of muscle and tissue. Blood seeped from the wound but there was no bone exposed.
Northern Sun: Book Four in The Mad Mick Series Page 27
