Dan whirled to make sure no one was getting through the Sig Sauer or Beretta cracks, but even as he brought the remaining ten rounds of the Canik to bear, he saw it was a losing game. At their best, even if they had ammo and time to reload, all four guns had forty more shots, tops, while the attackers had bulletproofing, lasers, diamond-tipped needles, and seemingly unlimited air at their disposal. Unless Bloch had a cannon somewhere secreted around, they’d either have to make a break for it, or go down trying.
Diana didn’t have a cannon. She had something arguably better. As Dan stepped up to join his family, laying down a wall of lead, he heard Bloch bellow.
“Eyes shut!”
All three Morgans took a knee, squeezing their eyes shut as tightly as they could. Even before their eyelids were completely screwed down, there was an ear-pounding sound, like a flashbulb magnified a hundred times. Dan felt a needle speed by his nose and felt the heat of a laser beam by his cheek, but then, for a blessed second, nothing more.
“Come on!” he heard Bloch roar.
When Dan opened his eyes he saw the attackers rolling around on the ground, kicking, their hands clamped to their visors.
“Dan!” he heard his wife screech, then turned to see her and his daughter jumping into what looked like a cross between a dune buggy and an all-terrain vehicle, only with train wheels sitting on the rails instead of tires or tracks.
He leaped into the back with Jenny as Alex brought up her Sig Sauers next to Bloch behind the controls.
“Hold on!” Bloch hissed, then slammed her palm on a large red button where normally a car horn might be.
Dan hated it whenever a movie hero used the now useless cliché of “hold on,” but in this case, he was taken by surprise when the low-slung vehicle shot forward like a cheetah on crack.
“Be ready,” he heard Bloch’s words howl by them as the vehicle flew through the unfinished tunnel on seemingly worn tracks. “They could be anywhere along the line.”
Sure enough, Dan saw one helmeted attacker try to target them, but they sped by him so fast, Dan didn’t even have time to target him back.
“What the…?” Dan blurted.
“Same concept as roller coaster electromagnetic launchers,” Bloch said while checking in all directions as they sped past abandoned construction equipment. “The tracks were already laid. Shame to waste them.” She turned to look at Dan. “The Big Dig used these things to travel between construction sites.”
“At these speeds?” Dan blurted as he pushed his arm straight over Bloch’s left shoulder to shoot her Canik at a laser rifle sniper crouched at the crook of a tunnel.
Bloch laughed as she went back to scanning the area as they sped by, with the Morgans doing the same.
“What did you do to them back there?” Jenny asked Diana breathlessly.
“Flashbanger,” Bloch explained. “Blinds, deafens, disorients. Cheapest, easiest, most effective defense. Had a line of them set up like a moat wall above the place I hid this electrocar.”
“Good thing they were just more local hired help,” Alex growled.
“How do you know that?” her mother asked.
“I was a much better shot than any of them,” her daughter replied.
“Yeah,” Dan agreed. “Some of them acted as if they had never fired their weapons before.”
“Damn Alpha sending all their dupes first to find our techniques, strengths and weaknesses,” Diana griped, “before taking us on themselves.”
“Fine, but how did they know where to send the dupes?” Alex wondered angrily, her trigger fingers itching to take down as many as she could.
“Good question, that,” Dan grunted, checking behind them.
Diana opened her mouth to comment, but closed it to think instead. The car sped along the track for a few seconds in relative silence, until they all saw light ahead.
“You sure you weren’t followed?” Bloch asked.
“You know we weren’t,” Dan answered. “The only people who knew we were coming here were…”
“Get ready to jump!” Bloch interrupted. “And hit the ground run—”
The electrocar smashed into another seemingly rusted gate, hurling it open and sending the train wheels onto gravel, dirt, glass, and overgrown grass. They now found themselves at the opposite end of the abandoned lot Dan and Alex had entered by.
“Go, go, go!” Diana yelled, already running for the fence. “Until we get into the city, we’re sitting—”
Before she could finish the warning, needles, light beams and invisible air fists were splattering, slicing, and pounding all around them, shot from the tops of the buildings and walls that closed in the vacant lot. At least the needle and laser rifles could be spotted by flashes and light, and all three Zeta ops targeted them back, while Jenny was smart enough to use the remaining shotgun rounds to deflect the diamond-tipped missiles.
But an air punch wrenched the Beretta from her arms. She spun, grunting, but Dan caught her and propelled her along as Alex put a Sig Sauer slug into the air cannon’s barrel. It exploded in the shooter’s arms, sending him cartwheeling through the air, then off the roof, to splatter on the ground.
Dan got his wife back running, then gritted his teeth as he felt a needle rip across his thigh. It didn’t stop him, but it slowed him for a second, until his wife tried to return the favor by helping him forward.
“Jenny,” he groaned, “no.”
A light burned across her shoulder and his chest. It was a good thing that these attackers were amateurs. If the sniper had been a pro, the light would have chopped them open like death’s scythe.
Alex shot into that barrel too, but instead of decapitating the sniper, it merely made the rifle explode, burning off his face and four of his fingers.
They all kept running as fast as they could, but the shots were getting closer and closer all the time. Even if the attackers were amateurs, they’d lock in their range eventually, and long before the Morgans and Bloch could reach the fence, get over it, and cross the street into the protection of alley walls. They couldn’t even dodge or take protection against one wall. The snipers on the other walls would just make mincemeat of them.
Dan was about to demand they all get into a circle and take on the snipers the way wild west wagons got into a circle to take on bandits. Maybe then they might be able to take down the amateur hired help before they were all too badly wounded or killed.
Morgan’s last stand was canceled when they all felt the powerful downdraft Dan had already felt with Lulu in the Taiwan forest. The helmeted men who weren’t blown off the walls then dropped one by one as if by God flicking his forefinger into each of their heads. They all spun off their posts like toy soldiers swatted away by a bored bully.
Shielding his eyes, Dan managed to look up to see Peter Conley’s “Peking Duck”—namely, Danhong “Dani” Guo, an ex-finance ministry agent for China who had been “Smithed” and, truth be told, “Cougared” into Zeta—holding what looked like an H-shaped double barreled rifle that sent laser-targeted lances out of both cylinders as fast as she could pull the trigger. As Dan watched in amazement the lances didn’t fly straight. They curved in the air, going wherever they needed to impale their targets.
With the addition of the Zetas’ other handguns, the Alpha hired help was down and done within ten seconds. Ten seconds later the Flying Fox had landed in the field, and Dani was helping Jenny on board.
“We need to check all these bodies for clues,” Bloch mused as she surveyed the human wreckage.
“Good luck with that,” Dan informed her, joining her in the survey after collecting a fallen laser, needle, and air rifle. “I can guarantee there’ll be no other physical evidence, and all any wounded survivor would know is that some anonymous stranger paid them big money to go to a specific place and kill whoever was there.” He motioned to a few crumbled corpses.
“Be my guest if you want, but the only other trustworthy partners are a few thousand miles away.”
Bloch gave him a piercing stare. “You think?” she asked tellingly.
Then they were both distracted by a rising noise coming from the tunnel the electrocar was wedged in. All the Alpha hirelings who had been sent inside were now squeezing and crawling out, bringing their guns to bear.
“Oh, great,” Dan growled, turning to call on Dani and Alex.
“No,” Bloch advised him, one hand up as she rummaged in her vest with the other. “Wait.”
So Dan waited, keeping a watchful eye on the Alpha thugs gathering in strength all around the electrocar.
“Uh, Diana…,” Dan started as the enemy started pointing, yelling, and running toward them.
But then Bloch held up something that looked like an automatic car lock device, and pressed a little square button on it.
Every Zeta not in the aircraft hunched over instinctively as the electrocar exploded with the force of Satan’s fist.
Dan straightened, knowing that whatever Alpha wasn’t killed instantly by the detonation had had their internal organs pulverized by the shockwave. He looked down at his Zeta superior, who stood surveying the body count blithely.
“I, for one,” she told him, “took to heart the advice of a British peer.” She turned and walked calmly toward the open hatch of the Flying Fox, where Dani, Alex, and Jenny were waiting. “Never let them see you bleed, Cobra,” she told him when she joined the others in the jet. “And always have an escape plan.”
Chapter 35
Landing Palecto at Fox Burrow the second time was different than the first time.
This time there was no just dropping down, stepping out, and walking in. This time the occupants had to wait to be thoroughly scanned, med-checked, and debriefed before they even got to the hatch. That meant that each had to spend a few minutes in the med-cap on board where they were x-rayed, ultra-sounded, cat-scanned, and digi-probed in ways they could only imagine.
After all that—“And not even a lollipop,” Alex had groused—they moved to what Conley called “the biz booth.” Dan and Alex hadn’t even known the thing existed until Conley pressed yet another invisible latch line on the curved wall.
They reminded Dan of a scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the lead scientist talks to his child from a space station orbiting the moon, except the image here was much clearer and the sound much better. Every person now on the Flying Fox got to spend a few minutes seemingly having a pleasant, innocuous talk with strikingly realistic holograms of Lily Randall and Scott Renard.
“It was like 3-D Face-Time without an iPhone,” Alex had commented on that one.
In any case, as everyone waited for everyone else to get vetted, Dani had plenty of time to explain the new weapon she had used against the Boston hired help—the double-barreled, H-shaped cannon that had swatted the bad guys off their walls like flies.
“It’s a hand-held version of the railgun the Chinese Navy revealed awhile back,” the striking, willowy Chinese woman said. “Like the electrocar you escaped the underground in, it uses electromagnetism to launch a projectile at more than five thousand miles per hour.”
Jenny needed a second to visualize that, but it didn’t faze her daughter. “But those weren’t simple projectiles you were firing,” Alex said.
That brought a smile out of Dani. “No,” she agreed. “This new iteration adds a digital component. Rather than just firing simple unthinking shells, this device has a targeting computer than can communicate with the missiles themselves, allowing each to pinpoint a different target in succession.”
“Expensive bullets,” Alex commented.
Dani shrugged. “China can afford them.”
“You mean those big bullets can think?” Jenny asked.
Dani gave a little, charming, laugh. “Not quite,” she answered. “But close. The weapon sends out a wide beam that maps the targets—targets I can edit so no innocent bystander is hit—”
“So you better be quick,” Alex interrupted.
“Yes, that would be best,” Dani told her. “But the weapon will wait, and adjust while it continues to keep remaining targets marked even if they move—until the trigger is pulled.”
Alex gave a low whistle. “So you don’t need to be an expert marksman, but you do need to have quick hand-eye coordination.”
Jenny looked to her daughter with concern. After all, Alex was now Zeta’s hot shot sniper and this weapon could make her obsolete—the way she had made Diesel obsolete. “Does that bother you, dear?”
Alex laughed, putting her arm around her mother. “Are you kidding?” she told her. “What do I like better than target shooting?”
“Videogames!” Jenny laughed.
As the ladies took some quality time, Dan sidled over to Conley, who was in his usual position—arms folded, ankles crossed, leaning against the Palecto bulkhead in a space that was exactly equidistant from everyone else.
“So what’s with Renard’s version of the T.S.A.?” Dan grumbled. “Might as well get some airport security to do strip searches in a windowless room.”
Conley snorted. “Things are heating up, Daniel,” he told his partner with a sardonic look. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
“Considering what I’ve been through the last few days,” Dan replied, “it feels like I’ve been doing laps on a track of burning coals.”
“Yeah,” Conley drawled, “but aren’t you getting tired of more and more people knowing exactly where you are?”
Dan straightened, then looked at the rest of the people inside the Palecto cabin.
“Yeah,” he said, with realization. “Bloch said I don’t have the Threat Assessment Software on or in me, so what is everybody using to track me?”
“Good question,” Conley mused, drawing out the first word. “One that Renard’s and Bloch’s T.A.S. would love to know the answer to.”
Bloch herself emerged from the Biz Booth, a look of determination on her otherwise stiff face. As if on cue, the cabin hatch unsealed with an audible woosh. The Morgans, Conley, and Guo followed Bloch, who marched into Renard’s hidden home like she knew it well. Maybe she did.
Dr. Whittaker was waiting for them outside her office. She smiled, pointed at Bloch’s right ear, and crooked her finger. “Your turn,” she said.
But it was never that easy with Diana Bloch. “Just a moment,” she said, before turning to Dan. “For better or worse, I knew how the Zeta ear-comms worked. But I have no idea what the security level is on these.” She turned back to Dr. Whittaker. “Get Mr. Renard for me, please.”
“No need,” they all heard, turning to see Scott, as well as Lily Randall, inside Dr. Whittaker’s examining area. “Welcome back, Ms. Bloch.”
Bloch shifted her attention to Lily, all but ignoring Renard. “You and I need to have a little talk,” she said flatly before turning back to the others. “With all due respect, a private talk.”
Lily’s face went from being welcoming to deadly serious. “Yes, ma’am,” she said without an iota of self-consciousness before also looking at the others. “Please wait for us in the salon,” she told them.
“It shouldn’t take long,” Bloch added as she closed the door in all their faces—including that of a blinking Dr. Whittaker.
It didn’t take long. In fact, by the time Whittaker had finished installing an R-comm in Jenny’s ear and they’d made their way to a reunion with Linc and Karen, then all settled in to admire the scenery out the huge windows, Renard, Randall, and Bloch swept in, the latter motioning everyone toward the info center.
“How are you reading me?” she asked under her breath so everyone could hear her in their heads. Apparently the R-comm had passed even Bloch’s heightened sense of quality control.
“Loud and clear,” Jenny and Linc said in unison, making
nearly everyone smile.
“You owe me a Coke,” Jenny told the I.T. guy as they followed their leaders into the darker room.
“What does that mean?” Linc whispered to O’Neal as they took up the rear.
Karen shook her head. “Darned if I know,” she replied.
“Guess we’ll have to ask someone older,” he concluded as Bloch took up a position in the middle of the area, opposite Renard.
A hovering, rotating planet Earth appeared between them as if seen from space.
“What is the status of the hack attacks on Fox Burrow now?” she asked, her manner, position, and tone making it clear to everyone that the boss was back in town.
Renard’s fingers twitched and little ripples, like pebbles thrown in a pond, appeared all over the globe, then sent out arcing lines that converged on a spot in Northern California. Within seconds it looked like the flight routes of the most successful airline ever. Within a minute, it looked like a ball of yarn, with the planet underneath.
“Well, they haven’t diminished,” Renard commented, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Dan wasn’t wondering that, but he couldn’t help wondering where Chilly and Hot Shot were. They certainly were nowhere in sight.
“But,” Renard continued, “in terms of their intent, that seems to have shifted slightly since Cobra’s little odyssey began.”
“How do you mean?” Bloch asked.
Renard looked to O’Neal, signaling everyone that this was her area of expertise. He was too busy running his multinational company to deal with such minor dangers.
“They’ve become less focused, more diffuse,” Karen informed the others. “Before they were like fly fishermen, trying to hit a single trout. Now they’re like net trawlers, trying to catch as many fish as they can, so they can worry about finding the exact one they’re looking for later.”
All her talk made Dan think of Lulu. He wondered how she was doing…
“Cobra!” he heard.
He snapped out of his memory, then snapped his face toward Bloch. “Yeah?”
War of Shadows Page 24
