After America (11 page)

For a few seconds he hovered on the edge of indecision, unable to do what he had to. But the barking of the dogs reached him, telling him Sofia was releasing them from the barn. With his face contorted into a rictus of loathing, he struck a match and tossed it on to the nearest patch of oil, which ignited with a
whoomp.
He stalked out of the house without a backward glance.

Wiltshire, England

The ambush was a simple affair, two cars in a herringbone formation blocking Stock Lane, just before the T-intersection with Hilldrop Lane about three klicks outside Aldbourne. Bret spotted it as he crested a rise about five hundred yards short of the trap. Somebody without his experience, a local farmer, say, probably would have ridden right into it, assuming a breakdown or even a small crash had blocked the road. But Bret Melton had been through enough military checkpoints to recognize the unmistakable arrangement of vehicles. In fact, the very presence of two cars was enough to give him pause. Very few people had the resources for private automobile travel anymore. He squeezed the hand brake on the mountain bike as he reached the summit of the hill, very much aware of the baby’s presence in a carrier on his back.

“What the fuck?” he muttered before admonishing himself quietly. He was trying not to swear in front of Monique. She wouldn’t understand yet, but it was a bad habit he had to give up. He felt her shift in the backpack as he squinted at the cars. There appeared to be four, no, five men down there. Two white and three dark-skinned, probably of West Indian origin. There weren’t many from the subcontinent free to wander the British Isles anymore. They appeared to be inspecting the engine of one car. The hood was up and three of the men were bent over it, but that made him even more suspicious. The car was a late-model
BMW
by the look of it, and on the rare occasions that they broke down, there was very little you could do if you didn’t have access to a full suite of computerized diagnostic tools in a licensed repair facility. The baby cried out loudly, and a pulse began to beat in Bret’s temple. This just felt wrong.

The men were looking at him now, pointing. One of them waved, gesturing for him to pedal down to them, as though some passing cyclist might be able to help fix their high-tech sedan. Melton checked his watch. He was due in Swindon in about ninety minutes for the meeting with the Resources Ministry guys. He wouldn’t be missed back at the farm for hours yet. He shook his head. Something felt
very
wrong about this.

He stood up and pressed down on the pedals as if to trundle down the hill to them but instead turned the bike around and pushed off in the direction of home. A few seconds later the sound of slamming doors and engines firing up drifted over the rise.
Damn.
There was no way he could outrun these guys. They’d be on him in moments. He skidded the bike to a halt, dismounted quickly, and carried it over to the drystone wall that ran alongside the country road. He flung the bike over without any concern about damaging it, then scrambled over, taking considerably more care not to jostle the baby. He ducked down behind the wall as the first car, the
BMW
with supposed engine trouble, came roaring over the crest.

He dared not risk raising his head for a look as the cars rushed by. Monique was fully awake now and crying loudly. They wouldn’t hear her over the noise of their engines, but if the men stopped the cars and climbed out, as surely they must in the next few minutes, the baby would give away their position. He looked around desperately. A two-hundred-yard dash would carry him to the far side of the field and another drystone wall. A few trees stood in the northwest corner of this field, and another clump had been allowed to grow up a few hundred yards farther on in the next field beyond, a roughly rectangular paddock waving with what looked like a barley crop.

Bret didn’t debate his next move. He checked that the papoose was securely fixed, then took off at a sprint, bent low, making for the far side of the field. The ground was uneven, recently plowed, and he had to watch his footing lest he turn or even break an ankle. When he was halfway across, he heard the cars returning.

They screeched to a halt just as he made the barrier of the ancient rock wall. Taking it in one leap, he flinched and ducked instinctively as a single shot rang out behind him. He heard voices calling out for him to stop, but they simply spurred him on. If he could just make the next field, he might be able to disappear into the gently swaying sea of grain. Beyond that lay a remnant strip of forest, and from there it was a short, hard dash to the village of Aldbourne and the Home Guard office at the corner of Castle and Malborough. His cardio fitness was not great, not compared with what it had been when he was a ranger or even a correspondent. But he was pretty certain he could outrun the city boys behind him.

For the briefest moment he wondered what the hell they wanted with him and his daughter, but the question answered itself. It probably had nothing to do with either of them. This would be about Caitlin. As soon as he thought of his wife, more guns opened up. He dared not risk even a glance behind as he sprinted toward the wall, attempting to maintain an even, loping stride so as not to shake the baby too much. She was screaming now, a full-throated caterwauling wail.

From the sound of the gunfire he judged his pursuers to be toting light automatic weapons, some sort of machine pistol. A stuttering burst threw up small puffs of dirt about twenty yards to his right. The sorts of light arms they were using weren’t very accurate. If he was unlucky, there was a very good chance they’d hit him or Monique by accident.

Monique.

He cursed himself for strapping her onto his back, where she was exposed to the gunfire. He could have slung her on his chest but had chosen not to because it made riding the mountain bike a little more difficult. He reached and vaulted the next boundary fence in one fluid sweep as a burst of fire chipped sharp pieces of stone from the wall. His lungs were already burning, and he fought to control his breathing, drawing in long, deep breaths rather than giving in to the urge to start panting and gulping for air. This field looked to be about three hundred yards across, and beyond it lay the relative safety and cover of the barley crop. A flight of birds took to the sky from a copse of yew trees at the far side of the meadow. Behind him a machine gun coughed and stuttered, and one of the birds exploded in midflight, dropping to the ground ahead of them.

Bret’s vision began to blur, and he could feel a stitch gripping his gut just above his old appendix scar, but still he pressed on.
If I can just get to the next field.

A single shot caught him in the right leg, just above the knee, and he screamed as he went over, throwing his arms out to accept the full weight of the fall so that he would not roll over and crush the baby. He felt a bone snap behind his left wrist, and his jaw smashed into a jagged rock thrown up by the blades of the last plow that had passed through there. He coughed and choked on a mouthful of dirt and attempted to haul himself up again, but the injured leg wouldn’t take his weight and it collapsed underneath him. He began to crawl, anyway, ignoring the raucous, braying laughter he heard from behind. They were close now.

A gun roared, much louder, and chewed up the thick brown earth a few feet away.

“That’ll be far enough, brother.”

The voice was accented slightly. London with an underlay of Jamaica, perhaps.

Bret used his good arm to lever himself up. He’d made it to within ten yards of the wall and lay within the dappled shade of the largest yew tree.

Monique was screaming and trying to crawl out of the backpack.

“Fuck, would somebody shut that little shit up.”

That voice was pure East End, and Bret glared at the speaker, a redheaded tough in his early twenties. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt, and his arms were covered in the fuzzy, amateurish tattoos of a convict.

“Quite a chase you led us, mon,” said the darkest of his hunters, the one with the slight Caribbean lilt.

Bret was too short of breath to reply. He merely moved his body to put himself between the baby and their captors. Not that it would do any good. They had him at their mercy, and their mercy looked thin indeed.

“What do you want?” he asked at last as they stood over him. His leg was in agony, and the broken wrist felt as though it were on fire.

“It’s not what we want, mon. It’s who. Where is your wife at, eh? The lovely Caitlin? She wasn’t where we were told she would be. She is supposed to run along here, mon. But here you are, and where is she?”

He felt nauseous with the pain and with something deeper and uglier, a creeping sense of his failure.

“If you’d found her,” he said, nearly gagging on the effort, “you’d be dead by now.”

The redhead with the tatts laughed, and Bret recognized his donkey bray from a few moments earlier.

“You reckon, do you, pal?” He grinned just before his teeth disappeared in an explosion of gore.

A thunderclap from a powerful handgun, a Beretta, rolled into a series of short, flat explosions, almost impossibly close together. Another three of the men went down as huge gouts of blood and tissue erupted from the center mass of their bodies. The West Indian, his eyes suddenly as wide and white as Ping-Pong balls, loosed off a wild unaimed burst from his sidearm, an old Heckler & Koch MP5. It clicked empty after a brief stutter of fire, and he turned to run just as Bret caught a flash of color in his peripheral vision, a blurred figure leaping the drystone wall.

Caitlin.

She seemed to materialize instantly at his side in a combat shooter’s crouch and snapped off two more rounds. The fleeing man cried out as the bullets’ impact and his own momentum lifted him off his feet and slammed his body hard into the ground.

Caitlin’s voice was harsh and clipped, almost alien in its tone. “You all right? The baby’s all right?”

Monique was still screaming, but she sounded distressed rather than in pain.

“We’re fine for now, I think.” Bret coughed, spitting more dirt from his mouth and ignoring his agonizing injuries.

Caitlin walked quickly over to where the four men she’d first targeted had fallen. Without preamble she executed two of them with a double tap to the head. Another she kicked, but Bret could tell he was already dead, shot through the heart.

The redhead was attempting to crawl away. The lower half of his face hung in tatters and a terrible, animalistic keening sound came from his throat. Caitlin approached him with the muzzle of her pistol trained on the back of his head. She quickly glanced up to where the last of the five, the Jamaican, was also trying to escape, dragging himself back toward the cars. His legs trailed behind him uselessly.

Bret watched as his wife made some grim calculation before firing two rounds into the head of the man closest to her. His skull came apart, spattering her with blowback.

Monique screamed louder with every shot. Bret did his best with what felt like a broken wrist to unhitch the papoose and drag her around as Caitlin stalked over to the sole remaining survivor. Bret was pulsing blood from a bad wound to one of his fingers. White fire burned through shards of glass rubbing against each other in his leg and wrist, but he managed to cradle Monique in his good arm. He kissed the top of her head, humming softly, and rocking her back and forth. He waited for the last shots, but they never came.

Caitlin approached the Jamaican from behind, waiting until he had levered himself up on his arms as he crawled desperately for the imagined safety of his car. She launched a short, vicious kick into one elbow, snapping the joint with a sickening crack. The man screamed and rolled over onto his side, which allowed her to piston another kick into his solar plexus. The howls cut off abruptly as the blow drove all the air from his body. As Bret watched, horrified, his wife placed her running shoe on the man’s throat and pressed down, all the while training the pistol on his face. After thrashing around for a short period, his body went limp. She delivered a kick to his groin just to check, but he was lights out.

Holding the muzzle of the M9 against the back of his neck, she searched his pockets, pulling out a cell phone.

Bret’s last memory before he passed out was the beeping of the keypad as she called for help.

The hospital, a modern facility, sat next to Junction 15 of the M4 motorway, a relatively short ambulance ride from the scene of the killings. The paramedics assured Caitlin that Bret and Monique would be fine and that she had nothing to worry about, but sitting in an interview room of the Gablecross police station in Swindon, she couldn’t help but worry and fret on their behalf. Bret had lost a lot of blood before she was able to tie off his wounds, and Monique was still screaming when they took her away. The police had refused to allow Caitlin to keep Monique with her, and she supposed she could understand their point. She had just shot and killed four men and critically wounded another. Her running outfit was tacky with their blood, and she kept finding small bone chips and worse in her hair.

“We really can’t help you if you won’t help us,” Detective Sergeant Congreve said for the third or fourth time.

The female constable sitting beside him across the table gave Caitlin a sympathetic look, which had no more effect on her than a small bird flying into a brick wall.

“You need to call the number I gave you and tell them what’s happened,” she said. “I can’t help you. There is nothing else I can say.”

Congreve, a chubby, dark-haired man with a large drooping mustache, frowned unhappily.

“Somebody will be doing just that, Ms. Monroe, but until then, why don’t you tell us what happened. You appear to have been defending your partner and child from armed men. There can be no harm in explaining what happened, can there? Was it just happenstance that you came across the villains while you were running?”

It was total happen-fucking-stance, all right, but she remained silent.

Congreve exhaled slowly.