He looked back to Boxers, who’d taken a textbook standing shooter’s position. He’d deployed his H&K 417, their portable cannon. “Just stay low,” Big Guy said.
Jonathan crouched and pulled the safety pin on the grenade. He pulled on the door, and as it opened, Boxers let loose with one long, sustained string of 7.62 millimeter bullets. When Boxers paused, Jonathan heaved the grenade into the crowd, pushed the door shut again, and whirled to press his back against the door as he saw Boxers flinging himself to the ground.
The explosion was bright and sharp, and immediately followed by the sickening high-pitched screaming of terrified, wounded men. It was their cue to move.
“Hand on my ruck,” Jonathan said.
Yelena stood there, staring at the smoking stairway and the bodies on the floor. “Oh my God,” she said. “How many people did you just kill?”
“The hell do you care?” Boxers countered. “Move.” He nudged her forward.
She resisted. “Oh my God.”
Jonathan grabbed her by the front of her vest, under her chin, and pulled her close. “This is what you signed on for,” he said. He intentionally infused his tone with a hefty dose of menace. “Inside these walls, there’s only good guys and bad guys. Think of Nicholas and Josef and let’s finish what we started.”
In that moment, Jonathan lost patience with the First Lady. Who was this confessed terrorist, no matter how reformed by time and privilege, to pass judgment on him for doing the job that she’d asked him to do? She wasn’t his precious cargo anymore. She’d surrendered that role the instant she chose to jump onto the boat and join a fight where she wasn’t welcome.
“Just keep up,” he said. “And consider yourself at weapons free. Take your safety off, keep your finger off the trigger, and shoot at anybody you don’t recognize.”
A panicked voice rasped from Jonathan’s pocket. “We have intruders in the compound! Oh my God, I don’t know how many they’ve killed. They’re in area four, headed south. I think they’re heading for the prisoners.”
“Hey, Boss,” Boxers said, “how about we talk less and move more?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
David sat in the woods on a fallen tree, waiting. For what, he wasn’t sure, but his chest heaved from the effort to run back to the truck, and then back to the water’s edge, this time with his body armor and rifle. He’d moved from the spot where he’d been seen the last time, but he was still in the same strip of trees. Saint Stephen’s Island lay less than a half mile away, across frigid water and an elevated roadway, and while it was so very, very close, it might as well have been on Mars. He’d never felt so isolated.
The caravan of trucks now looked like a string of red lights in the distance, lined up in single file along the front of the prison complex. This had to be for the transfer of the weapons. The timing was too perfect for it to be anything else.
He wished he’d checked his watch when the boat pulled away. He had no idea how much time had passed, but it felt like it had been way too long. Where was the explosion of the storage building? If it didn’t happen soon, the trucks would start leaving. And then what?
Well, he had a rifle, didn’t he? These people were trying to kill him; shouldn’t he be trying to kill them right back? If a truck got past him, who would be left to stop them before the weapons slipped into the United States? Sure, they could alert the authorities to look for moving and storage trucks, but who said the materials would stay in the trucks?
If these guys were smart — and as organized as they were, there was every reason to believe they were smart — they’d have cars staged all over the place into which they could transfer the weapons and explosives. Maybe some of them would get caught, but others wouldn’t.
He made up his mind right then that he would stop any trucks that tried to get past him. It was the right thing to do. It was a way for him to participate in the fight that had so much to do with his own survival.
If he didn’t freeze to death first. He was so desperately cold — not so much his torso because his coat and his vest took care of that — but his hands and feet ached with the cold, despite the gloves and boots. He’d lost feeling in his lips ages ago. Sitting on a snow-covered tree trunk didn’t help much.
He waited, staring out across the road and water at the behemoth of a building, wondering how many other benign buildings in North America — hell, around the world — harbored such evil secrets. If terrorists could gather en masse in the middle of a metropolis, what hope was there of ever stopping them?
He knew from his reporting that the FBI and the other alphabet agencies around the world did their best to track the organizations they knew about, but what about the ones they didn’t know about? Anybody with a cause and a knife could become a small-time terrorist. Anybody with a cause and connections could become the next Al Qaeda. These nut-jobs were like weeds, growing without limit, wherever they decided to take root.
David thought back to the cheering and political posturing that always attended the death of a high-profile terrorist, or the takedown of a known stronghold. He’d read the reports in his own newspaper extolling the success of American power over that of the bad guys, and the implication was that as the FBI or CIA rolled up that group or the other group, we were making progress against terror in the world, yet apparently, no one even knew about this group. How many others didn’t people know about?
These thoughts took him to a dark place in his gut. It was a hopeless place, one he’d never visited before, and definitely didn’t like. As a reporter, he understood that people needed to know about such things, but he also knew that they wouldn’t want to. For sure, Charlie Baroli wouldn’t print such a story. He’d want the proof, the evidence. But that was just the point: there was no proof or evidence for the unknown threat that we nonetheless know is present.
Jesus, how stupid can we be? In popular culture, we were so protective of our perceived security that we didn’t want to burst the bubble with a dose of reality. We were so concerned about hurting someone’s feelings that we won’t suspect obvious intent until the intent becomes reality. As a reporter, he felt terrible for having been a tool of that complacency.
It all felt like too much to process. It all made him feel ill.
He damn near fell off his log when every light in the prison came on at the same instant.
As he squinted through the cold to figure out what was going on, he realized that those weren’t the only lights added to the darkness. A vehicle was screaming through the night, headed right for him. It wasn’t one of the moving and storage trucks, but rather something smaller. Maybe a pickup or an SUV?
He wondered if Scorpion had already scared them into running. The thought amused him, though it begged the question of what he should do about it. It was one thing to shoot at a truck that he knew was loaded with explosives destined to kill innocent people, but absent that, wouldn’t shooting into a fleeing vehicle just be murder?
As he thought these things, he kept the safety engaged on his rifle. The last thing he wanted or needed was to fire off a shot accidentally.
The vehicle slowed as it approached, leading him to believe that they truly were fleeing, reducing speed to make the turn onto the Ottawa Parkway.
As it passed him, David saw that it was indeed an SUV, and it had more the one person inside. A whole group was running away.
Only they continued to slow. Finally, they stopped at the spot where David had been standing when he encountered the truck driver.