Linus, the librarian in Graham’s head, was moving like crazy to arrange all the logic cards so he could read them. “She didn’t set me up for torture,” Graham said. “She set me up to help terrorists.”
How was that for a shit-sicle? How could she do that? How could they do that — Dad had to be in on it, too, right? Well, maybe not the part that directly involved Graham — Dad had already been killed by then — but the rest of it. The terrorism stuff. He paced again. He was thinking about his parents — the people who had brought him into the world, wiped his butt, and preached right and wrong. He knew he should be sad for their injuries, but all he could feel was anger.
“Holy shit, Jolaine, how could they?”
“I’m really sorry—”
“Wait,” Graham said. “No, no, no, that doesn’t make sense, either. Why would the terrorists attack and kill them if they were all on the same side?”
“Maybe Uncle Sam found out,” Jolaine offered, but her tone sounded more like thinking out loud than forwarding an actual theory.
“No,” Graham snapped. It was a stupid theory. “You heard them yelling to each other. That wasn’t English. No one yelled, ‘Freeze, FBI,’ or whatever they say in real life.” He stopped pacing again. “Gregory,” he said.
“What?”
“Gregory. That was the name of the man in the front door. Gregory. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, they know. I’m sorry, they know.’ Remember?”
Jolaine seemed to search her memory. “Okay.”
“The people we ran away from were the people who knew.”
“Knew what?” Jolaine asked. She looked like she was having difficulty keeping up.
“I don’t know. Jesus, how could I know?”
“Graham, I’m not even sure I know what you’re talking about anymore.”
He wasn’t either. He was trying to think his way through a problem. Finally, Linus dealt his last, most important card. “Oh, shit,” Graham said. “There’s another set of people trying to kill us.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who, but I know why.”
Jolaine saw it, too. “To keep these guys from getting the codes.”
“Exactly,” Graham said. His sense of triumph over solving a problem was quashed two seconds later by the obvious rejoinder. He shot a panicked look to Jolaine.
“They won’t bother to torture,” she said, connecting the dots for herself. “They just want to kill you.”
In a rush, he realized the truth of Jolaine’s earlier words. Sometimes, reality really did trump hope.
Tears pressed his eyes as he faced Jolaine. “We really are going to die tonight, aren’t we?”
The door to the freezer slammed open. Teddy stood there with three of his friends. His right hand held a sledgehammer by its neck.
His eyes showed murder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jonathan almost regretted his decision not to let LeBron show him the clearing in the woods. Driving with the lights off and NVGs in place, it took two passes to find the spot.
“There it is,” Jonathan said, finally. It wasn’t the clearing he’d seen so much as the tire indentations that led to it. Once spotted, it was obvious. “Either they’re not the only ones, or they come here a lot,” he said.
“You ask me, every inch of this Godforsaken town is worn thin,” Boxers said. He threw the transmission into park. “You’re sure you want to go with full rucks?” he said.
Jonathan shrugged. “It’s the neighborhood. If gangbangers decide to break in, I don’t care if they take possession of the Raven, but I wouldn’t sleep well if we gave them explosives and detonators.”
“Call it urban renewal,” Big Guy said and he opened his door.
“Full soldier,” Jonathan said. “We don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.” That was his term for full body armor, complete with chest plate and Kevlar helmet. It was unwieldy and heavy as hell. Boxers pointed to any opportunity he could find not to wear it, but the lack of push-back this time told Jonathan that he saw the risks, too.
When they were fully kitted up, they each carried their preferred rifles — Jonathan a suppressed M27 and Boxers a suppressed HK417—and a suppressed 4.6 millimeter HKMP7 holstered on their left thighs. Boxers also dangled a Mossberg twelve-gauge with a breaching barrel under his arm. No suppressor there, just a big bang.
With their four-tube night vision, the night had become day. Jonathan tied his gear in tight to limit any rattle, and then he was ready to go. “You all set?”
“Born ready,” Boxers said.
Jonathan turned a knob on his radio and said, “Mother Hen, Scorpion. We’re going hot and we’re on VOX.”
“I copy,” she said. “Do a good job.”
Jonathan smiled at that. He’d scolded her once for wishing them good luck when they were stepping out on an op because, as he said, luck was a thing to be managed, not victimized by. Since then, she’d been struggling to find the right phrase. For Jonathan, do a good job was just fine.
When they arrived at the fence, Jonathan understood why people had missed the presence of the hole. It had been wired up that well.
“Think there’s a little OCD in young LeBron?” Boxers whispered. It took less than two minutes to undo the patch and lift the section away.
Jonathan assessed the size of the opening. “You’d better be careful, Big Guy. Turns out you’re bigger than their truck.” He pulled an infrared chem light from a side pouch on his ruck, snapped it, shook it to bring it to life, and then dropped it on the ground to mark the makeshift gate. Chances were good that there’d be a lot more activity swirling around them on the way out than there was on the way in. He didn’t want to be feeling their way along the fence in the dark, looking for the back door.
They approached the black side of the building as a single shadow gliding through the dark, moving slowly and deliberately so as not to make unnecessary noise. Jonathan scanned continuously left to right walking forward, while Boxers moved in the same direction walking backward, scanning their six o’clock for bad guys.
“Contact at twelve o’clock,” Jonathan whispered. The two guards stood at their stations, flanking the back door. The embers of their cigarettes flared in his NVGs. “MP7,” he said.
The 4.6 millimeter round from the MP7 was a devastating bullet when shot well. Barely wider than a BB, it left the muzzle at over 2,400 feet per second, but because it was so small, it made far less noise than the larger, faster 5.56 millimeter round from his M27. With the suppressor in place, there was no discernible muzzle flash, and the noise was less than that of a ladyfinger firecracker. Jonathan didn’t know how Heckler and Koch continued to get it so right every time in the manufacture of weapons.
All of the team’s long guns and MP7s were fitted with infrared laser sights that cast a beam through the dark that only they could see, thanks to their NVGs. In Jonathan’s world, fair fights were for losers. “I’m right, you’re left,” he said.
“Roger.”
“On zero,” Jonathan said, as he settled his laser on his target’s forehead. “Three, two, one…” He didn’t bother to say the word because it was the cadence that counted. Their weapons fired in unison, and their targets dropped in unison, their bodies unplugged from their brains. “Two for two sleeping,” Jonathan said for Venice’s benefit.
They resumed their fore-and-aft advancing configuration as they closed the distance to the rear wall. Jonathan didn’t bother to check the guards for pulses. The spatter told him everything he needed to know. “Okay, Big Guy. You’re up.”
Jonathan pivoted to cover the rear — their only exposed side, now that they were up against the building — while Boxers wrapped a loop of detonating cord around the electrical box serving the freezer unit inside. Detonating cord was every operator’s best friend. Essentially a tube of PETN — an explosive with a detonation velocity that exceeded twenty thousand feet per second — a coil or two could drop a hundred-year-old oak. Just an inch or two would make ridiculously quick work of an electrical cable. While Big Guy did his thing, Jonathan holstered the MP7 and brought his M27 to his shoulder and continually scanned left to right and back again, one-eighty to one-eighty.