Against All Enemies (40 page)

“Right where you are,” Jonathan said. “When it’s time to go, it will be time to go right friggin’ now. Alpha, acknowledge my last, please.”

Dylan said, “I copy that you want us to advance in the light. Is that correct?”

“Affirmative,” Jonathan said. “Try not to be seen.”

“Well, no shit,” Dylan said off the air. “Roger,” he said to Jonathan. “This is crazy,” he told Jolaine.

“We don’t know that yet,” she said. She opened up her laptop, bringing up the detailed satellite image of the compound. Dylan watched over her shoulder as she clicked in the details and did the calculations. “That bunch of trees over there,” she said, pointing thirty yards distant, “looks to be part of a constant chain of cover. If we hang to that, we should be able to get pretty close to the sentry station. That will also put us pretty close to the first objective.”

Dylan saw what she was describing, but didn’t like it. “We can’t bring the truck up there.”

“Obviously. We’ll have to hoof it.”

Dylan’s gut reaction was instant and emphatic. “What about the rest of the gear?”

“We bring it with us.”

“I don’t like this,” Dylan said. “If we kill the sentries in the light, then the entire plan gets knocked sideways.”

“We have to adapt,” Jolaine said.

“No,” Dylan countered. “We need a workable plan.”

“There’s always a plan,” she said, shrugging into the straps. “Scorpion
always
has a plan. He adapts quickly.”

“But
we
don’t have a plan,” Dylan objected.

Jolaine gave him a hard look. “No, we don’t, but we have the next best thing. Orders. Everybody is counting on us to do what we’ve been told to do.”

“This is crazy.” The key to survival in the SpecOps world was to plan the shit out of everything. Every contingency had a countercontingency. Superior planning, superior firepower, and overwhelming force. Those were the secrets to living long enough to retire.

Jolaine started walking. “Are you coming with me, or am I going alone?”

He had to hustle to keep from getting left behind as he donned his ruck. He was still getting it settled on his shoulders as he started across the field. Jolaine had to wait for him after she’d reached the tree line. Like him, she had rocked her NVGs out of the way, and it wasn’t till he got very close that he saw the anger in her eyes.

“Listen to me, Boomer,” she said. “I don’t know about your past—other than the bad stuff—and I don’t much care. I know that you served in the Unit with Scorpion and Big Guy right before everything went bad, and I know that Madman had a big role in what did go bad.”

Dylan recoiled from the words. How much had Digger shared with his new civilian friends?

“All of that is past now,” she went on, “and because you’re on my team, I choose to trust you and your judgment.” She thrust a finger at his face. “But don’t
ever
second-guess the command structure of this team in my presence again.”

Dylan scoffed and held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, I didn’t say I wasn’t—”

She didn’t let him finish. “I don’t care what you were or weren’t. I saw hesitation, and hesitation scares the crap out of me. These are the best operators I’ve ever worked with. If they say green is red and that shit smells like roses, then my first assumption is that they are correct. If you have a problem with any of that, then we need to part company right now.”

This was officially new territory for Dylan. He’d never gone into combat with a civilian before—or a woman for that matter—and the only times that he’d ever played fast and loose with well-established, heavily tested and toned rules, it had always been on his own terms. It was also a new experience to encounter Jolaine’s intense level of personal loyalty to the boss. He wondered where that came from.

It took less than ten minutes to walk the distance along the tree line. As they approached the road, the trees thinned to the point of barely being visible. In the distance, maybe fifty yards away, and uphill, he could see where the road met the fence and presumed that to be the location of the gate. This area was very brightly lit from lights atop twelve-foot poles. Dylan thought he saw four people milling about, so he brought his rifle up to verify through his scope. He dialed in ten-power magnification and confirmed what he’d thought.

“Mother Hen, She Devil,” Jolaine whispered over the air. “Can you confirm four sentries at the inner gate?”

A moment passed. “Mother Hen counts six. Plus two in the woods south of the tree line, unless that’s you.”

“That is us,” Jolaine confirmed.

“When you pull out, do you see any others?” Dylan asked. His question drew another glare from Jolaine, as if she considered herself the only one qualified to talk on the radio.

Venice took awhile with her answer for this one. “Negative, Boomer. Those at the gate are the only humans I see out in the open. There’s a small herd of deer, though, directly to your east.”

“Can you take two from here?” Dylan asked. As soon as the words were out, he knew he’d made a mistake. He’d accidentally emphasized the word
you,
making it sound as if he’d questioned her marksmanship as a function of his own.

“Anything you can do, asshole,” she said.

He considered apologizing, but realized that it wouldn’t matter. Therefore it could wait. Standing to his full height, Dylan pressed his weapon against the trunk of a stout hardwood and settled the stock into the soft part of his shoulder. He achieved his desired cheek weld against the pad on the 417’s stock, and without looking, he verified that the selector switch was clicked to full-auto. Taking out two men with automatic weapons fire was tricky, but it wasn’t as hard as most people thought, provided you knew what you were doing. The first target would be dead well before the sound of the gunshot arrived, and by the time the second target realized there was a problem, he’d be dead, too. “On your count, She Devil,” he whispered.

“You’re taking right, I’m taking left, correct?”

“If that’s the way you like it,” he replied. Actually, because he was standing to Jolaine’s right, it was the only solution that made sense, but for some reason it felt good to be a little shitty.

“Targets acquired?” she asked.

“On your count,” he repeated.

“In three, two, one . . .”

A millisecond before Dylan’s trigger broke, his first target stooped down, out of the sight picture. It was a clear miss, and rather than chasing Target One with the ten-power scope, he shifted to Target Two. He sent five rounds downrange in less than a second, and the target died instantly.

While the suppressors on their weapons muffled the report of the rifle, and all but eliminated muzzle flash, they’d burned through their subsonic loads, and the whip cracks of passing bullets told the survivors that they were under fire.

Someone up there started shooting back.

Dylan had never heard rifle fire sound so loud.

Chapter Twenty-eight

“W
ho’s shooting?” Boxers said, his head whipping around to the source.

“Shit,” Jonathan spat. “They started the war without us. Open the goddamn door.”

Boxers dropped to one knee and readdressed the slab of C4 explosive he’d packed against the latch assembly on the door.

Jonathan grabbed Big Guy’s discarded ruck and took five giant steps back to leave Boxers a clear path for retreat. Big Guy pulled the pin on the seven-second fuse, plugged his ears with gloved fingers and moved back to Jonathan’s position on the corner nearest the driveway.

GPCs were dependably loud, but this boom seemed louder because of the silence of the night and the shock wave’s reverberation through the corrugated steel wall.

The sound was still rolling through the hills when they pushed themselves off the wall and streamed back to the shattered door. The charge had blown a nearly perfect round hole in the steel where the lock assembly used to be, and had knocked the frame askew. Boxers got to the door first, stuck his beefy hand through the still-glowing hole, and pulled. It took two enormous yanks, but it opened, squealing metal-on-metal as the surfaces separated.

Stepping inside, Jonathan turned on the light. Why not, at this point? An industrial generator hummed in the center of the building, its exhaust pumped through ductwork out into the night. The total footprint of the machinery, including the service catwalk and appurtenances, covered an area of about twenty feet square. Someone had invested serious bucks into this thing.

“We just need it to be effective, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “We don’t need it to be pretty. Just kill the power.” He knew that left to his own devices, Boxers—who rightly considered himself a master of the explosive arts—could engage in overkill.

“You might want to step back outside,” Big Guy said. He lifted a thermite grenade from its pouch on his vest, and walked toward the main buss bar panel. He pulled the pin, placed the grenade on the top of the box, let the safety spoon fly, then quick-stepped out of the way. Little more than a can filled with a mixture of fine aluminum powder and iron oxide, thermite grenades had notoriously unreliable fuses once the safeties were disengaged, and once ignited, they burned white-hot through just about any surface—including the copper conductors that lay behind the panel door.

Jonathan stood just outside the door, scanning the night for threats. “Hey, Madman,” he said into his radio. “We’ll be ready to go in about thirty seconds.” Behind him, he heard the hiss of the thermite igniting, and he felt a blast of heat. Two seconds later, Boxers approached from his blind side and lifted him up and moved him over a couple of feet.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Big Guy said. Then he pulled an M67 frag grenade from his pouch and pulled the pin. “Frag out,” he said, and he tossed the bomb inside the room. As the grenade left his hand, the thermite did its job and the camp went black. Four seconds later, the ground shook from the grenade. Responding to the disapproving look he got from Jonathan, Big Guy said, “I feel better when I can hear the boom.”

Ian’s head snapped up at the sound of the rifle shot. Had there been a negligent discharge? He’d worried about the firearms discipline in this place ever since he’d arrived. But he thought for sure that with the extra training—

A second gunshot. Then a rapid burst of them. Then an explosion.

“Dammit!” His hand snatched his radio from its charger and he keyed the mike. “Gate One, Gate One, this is Carrington. Report.”

Nothing.

“Gate One, respond.”

Nothing.

The lights went out. He was bathed in blackness. The lights were out everywhere throughout the camp. “Good Christ, we’re under attack,” he said to himself. He keyed his mike again. “Communications, this is Carrington. Sound the general alarm.”

“Communications” was the radio designation for the central command post that occupied a reinforced concrete bunker in the middle of the compound. When it was completed, it would have its own electrical supply and would serve as a kind of castle keep for moments just like these.
When it was completed.
As in, three or four weeks from now.

“We don’t have electricity, Colonel,” said a young voice from the radio. “We got no general alarm to sound.”

God
dammit.

His heart racing, Ian tried to piece together the next steps. It had been a long, long time since he’d been in a real shooting war, and back then, he’d been the aggressor. He tried to make the pieces fall into place.

When he realized that shooting had stopped, he also realized that his sentries were either dead or had run away. He’d tried to put the best of the best on perimeter security, but it was never possible to know what people were going to do once the shooting started.

Whatever the facts turned out to be, the perimeter had been breached—whether by one or by a hundred, he didn’t know. But it was time to get the soldiers organized. He grabbed his vest and his M4 from its spot next to his bed and headed for the door.

If the sentry had stayed on the ground, he probably would have survived. Instead of accepting his gift of life for what it was, however, and no doubt panicked by the sudden deaths of those surrounding him, he chose to return fire to the night, first a single shot, and then a long burst, his shots all going wild. But flying bullets were flying bullets, and given enough time and a large enough number, sooner or later the odds got bad for anyone downrange.

Dylan was distantly aware of the sound of the GPC being shot as he settled the reticle of his gun sight on the sentry’s muzzle flashes. Before he could pull the trigger, though, Jolaine let loose with a long burst that silenced the other shooter.

“Let’s go,” she said, and she was moving again.

There was an odd X-factor in play, Dylan thought. It was as if she didn’t recognize him as part of the team so much as a burden to be born, a rookie to be babysat. When this was all over, he was going to have some words with her about that. For now, he followed.

After seven or eight steps, the tree line ended, leaving them exposed to the lights that—

Finally, darkness fell. Real darkness, too, the kind you only get out in the middle of nowhere, exposing a clear sky that looked cloudy with stars. Dylan pulled his NVGs into place and vision returned. Up ahead, beyond that second gate, commotion grew. People were waking up—literally and figuratively—to the notion that something was wrong. Gunfire, explosions, and then darkness all triggered fear, and fear triggered confusion.

That last part—the confusion—was what he and Jolaine had been assigned to maximize.

With the advantage of darkness now, they advanced toward the gate at a run, instinctively keeping low. Dylan kept his rifle up and ready, scanning continuously for any targets that might present themselves. Digger’s orders could not have been clearer. Anyone with a gun would die. Anyone who ran away with a gun in their hands would die, too, because retreating and surrender are entirely different things. Those who merely retreated often formed up again to reengage. By not killing them the first time, you exposed yourself and your team to the risk of death on the flip side.