Screw it. He keyed his mike. “I’m free of the trailer. Now I’m on my way to save the day.”
As he walked carefully through the snow to the front of the truck, he wondered if there’d be DNA or something in the yellow snow that would connect him to this night.
Then he realized it was silly to worry. He’d probably be dead before dawn.
The vest he wore over his coat was as bulky and uncomfortable in the front seat as it had been in the back, but he kept it on. The imagery that Scorpion had conjured as he explained the ballistic trenches that bullets carved through human flesh still lingered vividly in his mind.
The seat was as far back as it could go to accommodate Big Guy, and with the vest in place, David couldn’t reach to the floor between his legs to get to the adjustment bar. Muttering a curse, he climbed back outside to make the adjustment from a spot next to the door. When he was done, the seat was probably still going to be too far back, but he’d find a way to deal with it.
Finally settled into his seat, grateful that they’d let the engine and its heater continue to run, he pulled the transmission lever into drive and stepped on the gas.
Nothing happened. The engine whined louder and the tachometer climbed, but the truck itself didn’t move.
“You have to be friggin’ kidding me.” He was stuck in the snow.
Don’t panic. You’ve been stuck before.
He pulled the transmission lever all the way to the right, to low, and tried to be more gentle on the gas. With the slightest application of torque, the rear wheel spun as if it were… well, as if it were on ice.
With a flash of inspiration, he searched for the lever that would engage the four-wheel drive. There was none.
“Are you shitting me?” he yelled to the car’s interior. He pressed the radio button. “Hey Mother Hen. You there?”
“Go ahead.”
“Who’s the genius that ordered up a rear-wheel-drive truck?”
Silence. Then: “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Yeah,” David said. “I’m friggin’ kidding you because that’s what I do when I’m about to get caught in the middle of a shit storm. No, I’m not kidding! When we came out here, we were about a thousand pounds heavier than I am now. The bed of the truck is empty, the tires are on ice, and this puppy isn’t moving. And please don’t tell me to take a shit in the snow, because I really don’t see how that could help.”
“Stand by.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said off the air. “I’ll stand by. Because, you know, there’s no other goddamn option!” He slammed the steering wheel with his hand. He tried the gas again, pressing a little harder this time. The result was to move sideways and drift closer to the water. He took his foot off entirely.
“Shit.”
Boxers had just cut the throttles to coast into the shore when Venice delivered the news that the truck was stuck in Ottawa and would not be able to make the rendezvous in Quebec. The news knotted Jonathan’s gut.
He looked to Big Guy. “I say we’re in too deep to abort now,” he whispered.
“You’re damn right we’re not aborting,” Yelena said. Under the circumstances, Jonathan had granted permission to join them on channel one.
“Hush,” Jonathan said. “You don’t get a vote, and keep your voice down.”
Boxers said, “I think it’s tonight or it’s not at all.”
Jonathan acknowledged with a nod. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Y’all need to get us an exfil alternative, and you need to do it quickly. Wake up Striker and get him back in the game. If nothing else works, he’ll be able to pluck us out of the boat in the river.”
Jonathan let up on the transmit button and looked to Boxers. “Are you ready?”
“I’m always ready to make noise.”
Jonathan keyed his mike. “We’re going hot.”
Jonathan turned to Yelena. “Your job is to do exactly what I tell you, exactly when I tell you to do it. You don’t shoot at anything unless it shoots at you first, understand?”
She nodded. At last, that hard emotionless mask had started to crack. There might actually have been some fear in her eyes. Jonathan was happy to see it.
“I need you to say it,” he pressed.
“I understand.”
Jonathan continued. “If all else fails, stay low. Big Guy and I have night vision, you don’t. If you go completely blind, say something and we’ll stop. Do not turn on a light unless I tell you to. Got it?”
“Yes.”
He gave her a harder look, testing those eyes, then decided she was as stable as she was going to be.
“Okay, Big Guy, let’s go.”
Barely moving the throttles an inch, Boxers drove the boat up to the edge of the ice line, and then surged the engines once to run the bow aground. He kept the throttles engaged as Jonathan moved around the cockpit to the bow, where he grabbed the once-coiled thirty-foot line and stepped gingerly out onto the ice. With all the crap he was wearing, if he fell through, he would become the anchor.
The ice held. Jonathan suspected that the ice was really just snow-covered ground, which meant that they were lucky not to have broken off the motors’ propellers. Waddling across the snow at a crouch, he made his way to a young but sturdy-looking tree, and tied the rope around its trunk. Behind him, the engines cut off.
By the time he turned around, Boxers was helping the First Lady out of the boat and onto the ground. Ever the grouch, he was likewise always the gentleman.
Their designated entry point into the walled compound was the main entrance, an iron gate in the middle of the north-south wall, a hike of about a hundred yards. They moved along the western coast of the island, where the gentle slope down to the water gave them complete defilade from anyone who was not standing on the roof of the building. And after scanning the roofline carefully with a digital monocular, Jonathan determined that no one was.
When his GPS told him that he was directly across from the main gate, he beckoned for Boxers to follow him. “You stay there,” he said to Yelena.
Adjusting their equipment to stay out of the way, Jonathan and Boxers moved in unison to drop to their bellies and crawl the last fifty feet or so of the incline. Even the most bored, inattentive of sentries would be attracted to a pair of black silhouettes moving against the horizon.
They lifted their NVGs out of the way so they could survey the area more closely with their monoculars. The amount of ambient light, reflected as it was off the snow, gave them a pretty clear view.
River Road lay between them and the gate, and the far edge of the road passed within fifteen feet of the outermost wall. The front gates were not nearly as imposing as Jonathan had expected, consisting of wrought-iron spikes that rose not quite to the height of the twelve-foot stone walls. And they were wide open. A courtyard lay beyond the gate, measuring sixty feet wide by thirty feet deep. Two massive doors blocked entrance to the main building — building Foxtrot — on the far side of the courtyard.
“You suppose those big doors are locked?” Boxers whispered.
“Nothing a GPC can’t handle,” Jonathan said. A GPC — general purpose charge — was a block of C4 explosive with a det cord tail. Jonathan liked to think of them as skeleton keys. They guaranteed entry to anyplace he wanted to go.
“I count two sentries,” Jonathan said. Both stood inside the courtyard, flanking the big doors. They stomped their feet as if they’d been standing in the cold for a long time. “I see AKs — no surprise there — but no sign of body armor. You concur?”