Tom Clancy Duty and Honor (24 page)

When he was a half-mile from the cabin, he reached a fork in the road. To the right was Blaue Forelle Strasse, the cabin’s de facto driveway. He drove fifty feet past it and pulled over.

Part of him wanted to hurry, to find out why Belinda had gone silent, but he resisted the impulse. At Kultfabrik he’d rushed his clearing of the building’s third floor and had almost paid for it. If Belinda was already dead or had been taken, a headlong charge at the cabin would do nothing to change that.

He texted her again:
What’s happening?

After nearly a minute of silence, the phone chimed with her response: They had been in the house.

Red,
Jack texted.

Baron,
came Belinda’s reply.

Gone now?

I think so,
she replied.

How long ago?

Twenty, thirty minutes,
Belinda texted.

How many men?
asked Jack.

Don’t know! Afraid to move! Hiding in closet.

There were two possibilities, Jack decided, both plausible, and one perhaps the product of overthinking on his part: He’d gotten Belinda’s text within ten minutes of the crash at the lumberyard. If Möller’s men had been sitting on Belinda’s cabin, Möller might have ordered them to spook her, in hopes that she would send out a call for help, and then to hunker down and wait for Jack’s arrival. They had nothing to lose but time on a fruitless ambush. The second possibility was more straightforward: Having failed to kill Jack and Effrem, Möller had decided to minimize his exposure and ordered his men to withdraw. As for Effrem’s suggestion that Belinda was in league with Möller, Jack’s gut said no.

He called up Google Earth and zoomed in on the property. Sitting as it did in the river’s valley, the cabin was surrounded by trees in full bloom, fed by the Isar’s spring melt. While the terrain ruled out ambush-at-a-distance with long
guns, the thickness of the foliage offered plenty of places for bad guys to hide and wait for Jack’s approach.

Nothing’s perfect,
he reminded himself.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
He’d deal with whatever came.

Jack texted Belinda,
I’m just passing Eching. Be there asap.

If this got passed on to Möller’s men, it might give Jack an advantage.

—

J
ack spent the next thirty minutes picking his way through the forest until his legs were numb from crouching, his elbows and knees were raw from crawling, and the batteries in his off-brand NVGs were so weak that it was like staring into a static-filled television. The rain clouds had so far failed to open up, but rather spit droplets that struck the ground like hurled pebbles. Jack could feel a bone-deep cold settling into his limbs.

When the rear wall of the cabin finally came into view he forced himself to lie still in the undergrowth and watch for another five minutes. The cabin had indeed once been a Bavarian-style three-story farmhouse, with a cedar mansard roof, whitewashed exterior, and dark green shutters. It wasn’t far from what Jack’s younger self would have imagined a gingerbread house to be like.

Nothing was moving and he saw no lights.

Jack crawled ahead and wormed his way underneath the wraparound porch, then got out his phone and texted,
Almost there. Turning onto Blaue Forelle.

This was the road leading directly to the cabin. Now to see if his impending approach got a reaction.

Belinda didn’t respond.

Another five minutes passed. Either he was alone or Möller’s men were too damned good for him to spot. Next, the house.

—

B
efore he even reached the front door he could smell the stink of gas. Jack holstered his gun; its muzzle blast would be more than enough to ignite the gas. He pulled the collar of his T-shirt up over his nose and tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. He pushed through, then sidestepped left, clear of the backlit doorway.

Belinda had said she was in a closet.
Where, though?
He texted the question to Belinda and again he got no response. Depending on how long this gas had been flowing, she could already be dead.

Led by his penlight, Jack moved through the cabin as quickly and quietly as possible, opening windows and stopping at every door that might be a closet until he’d cleared the first floor. He climbed the stairs and repeated his search.
At the end of the hall, in a bathroom linen closet, he found Belinda curled into a ball. Clutched loosely in her hand was a cell phone, not the burner he’d given her. He checked her pulse. She was alive. He shook her. “Belinda!” No response. He rubbed his knuckles hard against her sternum and she let out a moan.

Downstairs, a door slammed.

Jack froze. Listened.

He crept to the bathroom window and looked out. The pane beside his head exploded. He ducked, dropped to his belly, crawled back to Belinda. He grabbed her wrist and dragged her into the hallway.

Think, Jack. Get shot dead or burned alive?

Belinda’s cell phone beeped. Jack grabbed it, checked the screen. It was a text.

Come out. You come with us, she goes free.

Beyond the obvious—that someone preferred him alive for the time being—this text message told Jack something: If they planned to blow the house, the ignition source was probably already in place and remotely controlled.

How and where?

Buy some time, Jack.
He texted back:
She’s almost dead. Can’t move her until she’s awake.

Come out now. She will be tended to.

This was a lie, of course.

When I know she’s okay, I’ll come out. Need fresh air. Breaking window. Don’t shoot.

No response.

Jack crawled back into the bathroom to the window and used the butt of his HK to shatter the remaining panes.

The phone beeped:
No more windows. Five minutes. Be smart.

Was the cabin close enough to Marzling to be on city gas? Jack wondered. Maybe not. Propane, then. He hadn’t seen a tank outside, so where was it? The most likely place was the basement.

He pulled Belinda close to him, scooped her onto his shoulder, then crouch-walked back down the stairs to the kitchen. He found the basement door set into the wall behind the dining table. As quietly as he could, he slid this aside and opened the door, revealing a set of stairs leading down into darkness. The stench of propane washed over Jack, almost doubling him over. He coughed and bile filled his mouth; he swallowed it. His vision was sparkling. Though all the windows on the first floor were open, propane tended to settle, so he was likely standing waist-deep in the gas.

Go out the front, Jack. Surrender, take your chances, play for time.
That might work for him, but not for Belinda, he knew. They would kill her regardless. The other option, to go out shooting, was also a nonstarter. In Hollywood
blockbusters this desperate gambit was glorious to behold and almost always successful, but it rarely worked in the real world. He and Belinda wouldn’t make it off the porch before being cut down.

Root cellar.
Unbidden, the words popped into Jack’s head.
Maybe.

Another text:
Three minutes.

Jack replied,
She may be dying. Not coming out until she’s awake. You want me, you have to wait.

No,
came the reply.

Send someone in here to help me.

There was no response, which was no surprise. For all he knew, his capture was a secondary priority. If he pushed too far they might simply blow the house.

Jack laid Belinda on the kitchen counter, dug his knuckles into her sternum, then flicked her eyeballs with his fingers. She winced, then let out a groan.

“Belinda! Do you hear me? Belinda, it’s Jack!”

“Jack,” she murmured.

“Is there a root cellar?” he asked. He wasn’t going into the basement, where the propane would be the thickest, without knowing there was an escape route. Jack kept rubbing his knuckles against her chest bone. “Belinda! Root cellar! Is there a root cellar?”

Her eyelids fluttered open and focused on Jack. “Root cellar?”

“In the basement! Is there one?”

She nodded feebly. “Behind water heater.”

The phone beeped.
Two minutes,
the text said.

Jack didn’t reply. They weren’t bluffing.

He threw Belinda over his shoulder, walked to the nearest window, spent thirty seconds inhaling fresh air, then clamped the penlight in his teeth and headed down the stairs, the beam dancing wildly over the walls. At the bottom was a narrow brown-brick passage. Now the stench of propane was almost acidic, like a chunk of manila rope being snaked through his sinuses. Jack turned right. Belinda’s head bumped against the bricks. She let out a yelp.
A good sign
.

The passage opened into a twenty-by-twenty-foot rectangular space with a dirt floor. Sitting against the left-hand wall was a long propane tank. Jack headed that way, playing his flashlight over the piping until he found a cluster of gauges. Zip-tied to one of the pipes was a pencil detonator bundled to a cell phone with duct tape. Simple and effective. The number of wraps on the duct tape made getting to the phone’s battery time-consuming. More important, the accelerometer that was likely built into this phone could also serve as an ideal anti-tamper switch.

Forget it, move on.

Belinda’s body, draped limply over his shoulder, started convulsing. She retched. Jack felt the gush of warm vomit on his neck. He turned his head, shining the beam over the
space. Ahead, sitting beside a line of wall-mounted wooden shelves, was the cylindrical water heater. Jack headed that way. Nausea washed over him and his stomach heaved. He kept putting one foot in front of the other.

The cell phone beeped again. He didn’t need to look at it. One-minute warning.

He reached the water heater and followed its curve to the rear wall. His knee bumped against something hard, but not brick. Wood. He looked down and his flashlight illuminated a waist-high hatch.

He dropped to his knees, grabbed the handle, and jerked. The hatch swung open. He bent at the waist and let Belinda slip off his shoulders, then wriggled past her into the tunnel. He reached back, grabbed her wrist, dragged her toward him. On hands and knees, he repeated the process until the tunnel opened into an alcove. Set into its opposite wall were four wooden steps that ended at a set of angled swinging doors; down their center Jack could see a slice of faint light. He crawled up the steps, put his back against the doors, and pressed until he was certain they weren’t locked.

He crawled back to Belinda, dragged her up the steps, her head thumping against each of them in turn. Jack removed the penlight from his mouth and clicked it off, then drew the HK. On his phone he texted,
Okay, coming out. Don’t shoot.

He didn’t wait for a reply but instead slowly pushed the doors, keeping his body as close to the ground as possible. If
they were seen now and the alarm was raised they’d start taking fire. Death by bullet or death by explosion, it didn’t matter.

Once he got Belinda onto level ground he started his crawl-drag routine again, aiming toward a cluster of trees ahead. Ten feet to go.

He rasped, “Belinda, help me, crawl!”

She muttered something incomprehensible, but his words must have registered. She started clawing at the ground and churning her legs.

Five feet.

Jack’s cell phone beeped. He glanced at the screen:

Time’s up.

He heard a whoosh. The air around him flashed orange.

And then heat.

—

A
voice shouting in German filtered into Jack’s subconscious. He forced open his eyes but remained still. His brain was playing catch-up, assembling imagery and sound into something tangible, familiar.

Cabin,
he thought.
Explosion.
The air was thick with the smell of burning wood and the sound of crackling flames. A few inches from his eyes a leaf was smoldering, its edges glowing orange. His scalp felt hot.

Jack heard a rustling. It was feet crunching through
undergrowth, he decided.
Don’t move.
There were no friendlies out here, he reminded himself. Only hostiles. He squeezed his right hand and felt the solidity of the HK’s grip.

The crunching came closer, somewhere to his front and left.

He tracked his eyes back along the ground until an arm came into view; this he followed back to a head of short brown hair. Belinda.

“Etwas?”
a voice called in the distance. Anything?

“Nein.”

The reply came from very close.

Very slowly Jack lifted his head, rotated it, and pressed it back to the earth. Eight feet away, a man illuminated by the flames crept from behind a tree trunk. His eyes scanned the ground ahead and to his sides. He held a compact assault rifle—similar to the FAMAS models carried by the men at Kultfabrik, Jack guessed—across his chest.

Belinda groaned, then stirred, rustling the leaves.

The man froze, then slowly pivoted toward the sound.

Slowly Jack rolled right, sweeping his gun arm under his body as he went until it was fully extended along the ground. He lifted the HK slightly and laid the front sight on the man’s chest. He fired. The man went down. Jack rolled back onto his belly, then wriggled sideways until he was facing the ruined cabin. All that remained of the structure was a
burning heap of debris sitting atop the foundation-turned-crater. The heat from the flames stung Jack’s face.