A Blued Steel Wolfe (16 page)

Part of him wished that they’d been able to leave the house in time to hit the gentlemen’s clubs. However, once he took this mansion and staffed it with his own men, he would have a source of income too. The strip joints would bring in some huge revenue, once he found some dancers and bouncers to staff them. His men were loyal to a fault, and he already had a manager in mind.
Los Angeles isn’t so bad,
he thought to himself.
The weather here is much better than it is, back in New York!

Salvatore turned his attention back to the present. Blood Scourge, as he liked to be called, kept typing fiercely away at his keyboard. The hacker sat against the wall outside of the electronically locked safe room, trying to figure out a way to bypass the system.

“Hey boss. I have to say that the guy who set up this system did a sweet job of it,” Scourge said with respect. Then he smiled at his boss. “He accounted for
almost
every contingency. Unfortunately for him, he never accounted for
me
!”

As he said that, the Blood Scourge hit the Enter key on his laptop.

***** ***** *****

Justin and his crew pulled up outside the gate of the compound. The sight that greeted them wasn’t good. Several bodies littered the ground, and most of them were Wolfe security personnel. His blood ran cold as he thought of only one thing.
Cammie! If she’s hurt in any way, God help those assholes!
He thought silently to himself.

“Patch, take us in hot,” he snarled to the driver. He readied his MP-5 and turned to his men in the back of the van as it started to gain speed. “Get ready! We’re going in full assault. The Russians have breached the mansion.”

“How are we going to play this, sir?” Gonzo asked. “Prisoners?”

“No, Gonzo,” Justin replied grimly as he shook his head. “We’re going to kill them all.”

The van screeched to a halt in front of the house. On Justin’s signal, the side and back doors opened simultaneously and his team emerged with weapons hot. Even the injured came out hot and stayed low, set to defend the van from any attackers outside the house.

Several Russians stepped out of the broken front doors, only to meet a hail of gunfire. The Wolfe team moved in cautiously, scanning in every direction.

“One o’clock!” Deck shouted, and Justin picked off a Bratva thug as the man brought up his AK-47. They continued towards the offices, where Justin hoped that Jared and Cammie would be. Just outside the door to Jared’s and Cammie’s office suite, he held up a fist to call a halt. He motioned down and peaked around the corner.

He found himself looking down the barrel of Trina’s pistol and lowered his SMG.

“Dammit sir!” Trina exclaimed as she raised the gun’s barrel towards the ceiling. “You almost got your brain ventilated!”

Justin looked around the room quickly. He spotted Jared’s wounded form, and Ray with a determined expression on his face as he typed away at his keyboard. Justin then motioned back to his people to file into the office and close the door. As they secured the door from the inside, Justin turned to Trina.

“Good to see you three. Where’s Cammie?” he asked.

“The last I saw of her, she was heading to the safe room with your mother and father,” Jared supplied. In spite of his wound, he appeared determined to live through this.

“Ok, I need a sit-rep. Does anyone know what all is going on?” Justin asked as he looked at the three survivors.

“Someone hacked us sir,” Ray said, as he never broke stride on his keyboard. “I think I know who it is, and he fucked with the wrong motherfucker today!”

“Who is it?” Justin asked urgently.

“If I’m right, he calls himself Blood Scourge. I’ve seen his code twice before when I worked for the FBI,” Ray explained. “We could never catch the bastard, though. He’s outstanding at what he does, and he never leaves anything that we can back-trace to his IP addresses. He uses multiple proxy servers and calls himself a cyber-mercenary.”

“So he’s a keyboard for hire?” Deck snorted a laugh.

“Laugh all you want, Sergeant Shepard,” Ray replied, never breaking stride as he tapped away at his laptop. “Keyboards can be even deadlier than guns in the right, or wrong hands. In this case,
definitely
the wrong hands! GOT HIM!”

***** ***** *****

The man known as Blood Scourge hit the Enter key, but nothing happened. “What the fuck?” he asked to no one in particular. He hit the key again, but again nothing happened. “This isn’t right. I know I got the right code for the door. It should be open!”

Then his blood ran cold when he saw a new message appear onscreen. It read:

U picked the wrong system to hack 8L00D5C0UR63

Now u will die

R4YGUNZ

“Oh shit,” Blood Scourge muttered. “Oh fucking shit!”

“What’s wrong?” Salvatore asked with a frown.

“You didn’t say anything about going up against RAY GUNZ!” Blood Scourge shouted. “He’s an FBI Agent, who almost caught me
twice
!

Then a new message appeared on the laptop screen.

I am not going to catch you.

I am going to kill you.

R4YGUNZ

“
Shit
!” Blood Scourge had time to scream, just before the lithium-ion battery in his laptop exploded.

***** ***** *****

“BOOYAH!” Ray exclaimed to as he jumped to his feet. “If Scourge isn’t dead, I bet he will be soon! I regained control of the security cameras. Salvatore has some shaped C-4 charges, and he is going to blast his way into the safe room if we don’t stop him.”

Justin nodded his comprehension and turned to his team. “Let’s go, but you two stay here to watch over Jared. Find Dr. Martinez, too!”

“Not so fast boss,” Trina said with a shake of her head. “I’m going with you.”

“So am I,” Ray said stoically.

“Ray, you’re a good man, but you aren’t an enforcer,” Justin said with a shake of his head. “I need you here to watch over Jared.”

“I’ll stay sir, along with our walking wounded,” Hondo, one of the wounded said. “We’d just be a liability right now. At least here, we can barricade ourselves in, just in case more of them are roaming around. We can defend this position and keep Jared alive.”

“I’ll be fine once you find the Doc to get me back on my feet,” Jared said with a brave smile.

“Besides, Ray is a damn good shooter,” Trina said with a smile at the tech expert. “He saved my life on the way here from the command center.”

Justin looked at Ray with new respect. He knew that the former black hat hacker was a good man. However, he forgot sometimes that Ray was also an ex-FBI Agent with training and field experience under his belt.

“Ok, let’s go,” Justin shrugged. “Stay behind us and let me take the lead. We don’t know how many of them are between us and the safe room.”

“Yes we do… oh shit,” Ray said as he watched on his monitor, as one of the Russians took aim and shot a security camera. Then he watched as several others went down in rapid succession. “Scratch that. They’re shooting out the security cameras! Dammit to hell!”

“We have to go
now
!” Justin emphasized as he led the way out of the office suite and down the hall, through the mansion and towards the safe room.

They moved quickly, keeping their weapons ready and their senses alert. They came under fire twice, but reacted quickly and decisively, ending the treats before they could take down any of the Wolfe security team.

When they reached the hallway with the safe room, however, their luck changed for the worse. As they took up positions, four Russians stepped out of a room down the adjacent corridor. Justin shouted a warning, but it was too late for Strickland and Malloy. Even as they turned, the Russian AK-47s lit the former Rangers up. The rest of the team blasted the Russians, but two of their own died that night.

Justin peered around the corner again, and barely made it back as several more Russians opened up with automatic gunfire. He swore quietly under his breath. Then he looked at Johns. “You still have the rest of those flash-bangs?”

Johns nodded and pulled one from his LBE vest. Justin held out his hand and the ex-SEAL handed the device to his boss. Justin pulled the pin and popped the spoon, letting it cook for a full second before lobbing it down the hall.

The loud bang felt deafening in the confined space, but Justin didn’t let that stop him. He went low around the corner, firing into each enemy he saw. The suppressed pops of his MP-5 went unnoticed by the reeling thugs as they tried in vain to regain their equilibrium. Justin and his team kept shooting, taking the villains down with precision fire.

Then once more, their luck turned for the worse.

“Grenade!”  Justin shouted as he saw a grenade roll towards them. He barely managed to dive into another room to avoid the blast. The three men behind him weren’t so lucky, though. They tried to run, but the grenade’s five meter blast radius caught them when it exploded. Gonzo came up and sidestepped into the room to check on his friend and boss.

Justin was shaking off the effects of the shockwave, even though he’d managed to dive behind a large dresser.

“Justin, get up!” Gonzo said emphatically. “Are you ok?”

Justin took a moment to shake off his grogginess. “I’ll live,” he said with a groan. “We can’t stop now. Let’s go!”

“Roger that sir,” Gonzo replied with a grim smile. He helped Justin to his feet and they nodded to each other. Then Justin led the way back out into the hallway. He took off at a sprint for the corner leading to the safe room, and the rest of his team sprinted behind him. He stopped just shy of the corner and looked back at his people. He took a quick peek and jumped back as rounds hit the marbled stone mere inches from where his face had just been.

“They have three barricades set up,” Justin reported to the team. “Looks like they grabbed some oak dressers from the bedroom and are using them as cover.”

“No problem boss,” Deck said with a shrug. He pulled a grenade from his belt pouch and got ready to pull the pin.

“No Deck,” Justin said quickly. “They’ve already set the charges. If you throw that, it will set the C-4 off.”

“Damn. In that case…” he said, putting the grenade back and drawing his silenced Beretta. He went prone, moved forward around the corner and fired three rounds. Then he moved quickly back. “Three tangos down, sir.”

“Good job,” Justin said with a smile. He leaned back out and no fire came back at him this time. He turned back to his men. “Follow me low and fast. Go!” So saying, he broke cover and did a low run to the first dresser/barricade. He knelt behind it and peered around the side. Several more barricades blocked their enemies from direct fire. The good news was that with the charges set as they were, if Salvatore set them off he, and the rest of his men would die too.

The bad news was that if Salvatore set off that much C-4 in a confined space, the door to the safe room would fall. The shockwave would then likely kill everyone inside. Justin related the situation as he saw it to his team.

“What are our options?” Justin asked finally. Gonzo, Patch, Trina, Ray, and Deck crouched with him behind the barricade as the rest of the team aimed above and around both dressers on each side of the hallway.

“I can’t do anything from here,” Ray said in frustration. “Maybe if I could make it back to the command center and reboot everything…”

“We don’t have that much time,” Justin said while shaking his head. “You’ve gone above and beyond already, Ray.”

“Go in guns blazing and hope for the best?” Trina shrugged.

“That
could
work, but it probably wouldn’t,” Justin replied. “They’re in a fortified position and we’d probably lose quite a few of our guys.”

“Is there another way around behind them?” Deck asked.

Ray snapped his fingers. “The air vents in the ceiling,” he whispered. “If we get someone up there, they could come down behind them.” To illustrate, he brought out his laptop from the case and called up the ventilation schematics. “There’s a drop-down here, behind their position.”

“That’s right in front of the door,” Justin said. “It’s also right on top of them. Whoever went down wouldn’t last very long.”

“I’ll go,” Deck said simply. When everyone looked at him, he continued. “I’m the best there is at close combat and you know it. There are only two people on Earth better than I am, and they aren’t here right now.”

“Sure of yourself, aren’t you?” Ray smirked. Deck gave the IT guru a raised eyebrow, and Ray nodded with a smile. “Point taken.”

“He’ll need a distraction,” Trina said. “How are we going to distract those assholes while Deck gets into position?”

A thought struck Justin right then. “We negotiate,” he said with a smile. “More specifically,
I
negotiate.”

Chapter 6

Walking on the Edge of Darkness