I froze. There was a small restroom in one corner of the building; the door was closed. It was unlikely the shooter was in there answering nature’s call, but…
I turned the man on the floor just enough to pull the pistol from his shoulder holster. It was a 9 mm auto. I thumbed off the safety, tiptoed to the restroom door and opened it with my foot. Empty.
I knew the man in the chair from my prior tours here. His name was Fred. I touched his cheek. Still warm. Very warm. His hand was limp and supple. He had at least eight bullet holes in him that I could see, and none of them had bled much. I fingered one of the wounds. The blood was still fresh and oozing.
These men hadn’t been dead long. Just a few minutes.
I had seen no traffic on the road. Now that I thought about it, the pathway up here showed no footprints. I glanced at the radio — it had a half dozen bullet holes in it. The telephone… I picked it up, didn’t get a dial tone. I put it back on its cradle.
Something was going down, but what?
I stepped to the door and looked at the porch. I could see other wet footprints. I slipped out onto the porch, walked along it to the end. Depressions in the leafy forest detritus were visible, at least two trails. One coming, one leaving? Perhaps the shooter had come this way, along the side of the hill through the forest, parallel to the road below. Then he retraced his path leaving. I knew what lay in that direction — the main complex.
I went back in the cabin and looked at the surveillance camera monitors. They were still working. The killers must have shot these men immediately before I pulled up at the hangar or after I left it. Or perhaps they were so busy drilling these guys they didn’t notice me on the monitors. If they had seen me, they would have met me down on the road or here at the cabin and killed me, too.
Later on I realized that this would have been an excellent time to jog down the hill to my car and beat a tactical retreat to the safety of the nearest village, where I could have called Washington with the news. There was nothing I could do for the men in the cabin. Unfortunately that thought didn’t occur to me then.
I checked the pistol. There was a round in the chamber and the magazine was full. I put the safety on and, with the pistol in my hand, started off through the forest following the tracks.
He knew his wife was probably dead. He had heard the ripping of the silenced submachine guns — still loud — and knew precisely what it was. She had been in the kitchen eating when he came into the bathroom, just moments ago.
He held his hands to his ears, trying to stop the sounds. Oh, God, all his nightmares were becoming reality!
He was completely unarmed, knew nothing of unarmed combat, knew it would be suicide to leave the bathroom. As the staccato bursts sounded closer, he surveyed the small room. There was a chute for towels… he opened it, wormed his way into it. And fell.
He landed in a pile of towels and sheets on a hard concrete floor. The basement.
He looked around, desperate for a place to hide. Oversized laundry machines were mounted against the wall — two washers, two dryers.
He had always had the ability to think quickly and function flawlessly under pressure; he had been doing it for twenty-five years under the noses of the paranoid professionals of the KGB. He used that ability now. Without wasting a second, he opened a dryer and crawled in amid the sheets and pillowcases, then pulled the door shut after him.
The thought occurred to me that if I wasn’t real careful, I could end up like Fred and his colleague. Whoever shot them used an automatic weapon, and I was carrying a peashooter.
I’m no hero — far from it. I’ve been around long enough to know I’m not bulletproof. I also know that revenge is something people only get in movies — not in America in this day and age. I kept going anyway. I wanted this guy. Wanted to shoot him my very own self… as long as I could do it safely, without doing any serious bleeding. I liked Fred, but friendship has its limits.
I took my time walking through the woods, pausing frequently to look and listen. The sound of rain hitting the leaves and big drops falling off the trees masked all other sounds. With the leaves on the trees and brushy plants and the reduced visibility from fog, I couldn’t see far. Still, the depressions in the wet leaves were easy to follow — even for a city boy like me.
It took about twenty minutes at my slow pace to get to the edge of the main complex clearing. Using the trees as cover, I sneaked to a spot where I could see, right behind a large tree. Flat on my face, I inched my head around the trunk. The main complex consisted of a two-story log structure that functioned as a dormitory, a garage for vehicles, and the main building itself, a huge, two-story log house with a covered porch that wrapped all the way around it. There were no vehicles in the gravel driveway.
A body lay on the front porch. From the way he was sprawled I knew he was dead.
A muffled ripping reached me, a second or so of sound, then another burst. The sounds seemed to be coming from the main house. I knew what those sounds were — bursts from a silenced submachine gun. The killers were still hard at it, slaughtering people.
Killers. There had to be more than one. The pistol felt useless in my hand.
Only a suicidal fool would charge in there with a pistol to face an unknown number of men armed with submachine guns. I’d certainly played the fool on numerous occasions in my life, but I sure as hell wasn’t suicidal. Lying behind that tree on wet, soaking leaves, I knew there was simply nothing I could do. I checked my watch. It was seventeen minutes after twelve.
Several minutes passed. The shooting seemed to be over. After those two bursts I heard, there had been nothing else. Now black smoke began to waft from the chimney.
I had been in the main room of the house on several occasions and remembered the huge, cut-stone fireplace.
The smoke became a column.
Maybe the bastards were setting the place on fire.
At twenty-nine past the hour a man wearing a camo outfit came out onto the porch. He had a submachine gun cradled in his arms. He walked to the end of the porch and, facing in my direction, made a come-here motion with his arm.
I froze, holding my breath. Certainly he couldn’t be motioning to me!
That was when I had a bad shock. A bush near a solitary tree twenty yards in front of me suddenly stood up and began walking toward the porch! It was a man in a ghillie suit, a web of cord and leaves and strips of rag that covered him completely and allowed him to sink to the ground and mold himself into the landscape. I could see the round sausage-shaped silencer on his weapon protruding from the suit.
If I had moved in any direction from this tree, he would have spotted me and killed me.
Every Tom, Dick, and Harry wore camouflage clothes these days, but silenced submachine guns and a ghillie suit? These men had the look of professionals. Military snipers, perhaps. Uh-oh! Right then I thanked my stars that I was wearing a dark green jacket, not my yellow one. The air went out of me, and I seemed to sink into the earth in my attempt to disappear from view.
I was also doing some hard thinking. When I saw the man in the camo clothes glance at his watch and take a two-way radio from a holster on his belt, I knew I was in deep and serious shit. They might have hiked across the hills through the national forest to get here, but I was willing to bet my pension these dudes were now waiting for a ride. Someone was going to drive a vehicle up the only road, and that someone was going to see my car — and call these guys on their handheld radios, which would cause them to come looking hard for little old me.
Even as that thought shot across my synapses, I heard the radio in his hand come to life. In that still air the sound carried, although I could not distinguish the words. Yep, both of them took a quick glance around.