When he was turned in the proper direction and in what felt like a stable situation, he called out softly, “Hey Liv, can you do me a favor?”
“What do you need?”
“Take a look at where the rafters come out of the wall. Try to keep me lined up over two of them at all times, if you can.”
“Roger.”
She backed up a few yards and gauged his alignment. “You’re okay on the left side, but a little wide on the right. Bring your foot in about six inches.”
Webb adjusted.
“Yeah. Now bring your right hand in about the same amount.”
He made another adjustment.
“Looking good. You think that’s gonna help?”
“It’ll help me feel better if nothing else,” said Webb.
He started a steady crawl toward the peak of the roof, responding to periodic calls for adjustment from Liv.
About half way to his goal, the Marine began singing softly to the tune of an old Willie Nelson song. “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Jarheads… Don’t let ‘em wear camos and drive in Humvees…”
“Getting too far left,” Liv said.
Webb edged his body a few inches to the right. “Make ‘em be plumbers or Walmart trainees…”
His next move brought a crackling sound, like the crunching of dry twigs. A tile under his right knee fell to pieces, fragments of clay falling through the new opening into the interior of the house.
Webb went motionless, listening and feeling for any signs of imminent structural collapse.
When nothing else happened for a minute or so, he resumed his creep toward the roof ridge, avoiding the gap where the missing tile had been.
“Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Jarheads… ‘Cause they don’t fold their napkins or use the right fork…”
The next line was hummed instead of sung. Webb hadn’t come up with a good rhyme for ‘fork’ yet. None of the easy ones—stork, pork, cork, and New York—seemed to fit with the rest of the lyrics.
He made the last few feet of the crawl without singing, humming, or speaking. The only sounds were his breathing and the low scuff of running shoes on old clay.
At last, he was there, at the roof peak. He could raise his head a few inches and see over the tops of the uppermost tiles.
Still careful to move slowly, he found the binoculars and lifted them to his eyes. A three-quarter turn of the focus wheel brought the largest building of the sugar mill into sharp relief.
Webb started with the left side of the building. This elevation wasn’t bad. Another few feet would have been nice, but he figured that he had sufficient down-angle for a workable line-of-sight.
The first few window frames had glass in them, the panes opaque with years (or decades) of accumulated dirt. Then came several that were boarded over with dry-rotted plywood. The next couple were glassless, but he could see nothing in the shadows within.
Then several more covered in plywood, followed by a long row with most of the panes missing. This was the opening he needed.
He began a methodical sweep of the exposed section of the building’s interior, giving his eyes plenty of time to adjust to the shadows within.
There… A rectilinear profile, marbled with the low-contrast greens, browns, and tans of forest camo. And a second shape; he could see the nearly man-high tires on this one, and the huge cylindrical form of the missile on its back. Fifteen degrees to the right was still another one.
“Pssssttt… Liv!”
“Yeah? What have you got?”
“Jackpot! I count three transporter erector launchers, and a possible fourth. There’s also—”
Liv never found out was the ‘also’ was.
She heard the impact of the bullet an instant before the muzzle report of the rifle. The top of Webb’s head came apart in a cloud of red mist. Then he was tumbling back down the incline roof, his body already gone limp with the loss of muscle tension.
There was a half-second of freefall when he rolled past the overhang and plummeted to the ground.
Liv took one look at the ruin of her friend’s face and confirmed what she already knew. Alan Webb was dead. There was no point in checking for vitals. All the CPR in the world would not bring him back from where he had gone.
Her immediate and instinctive reaction was a dizzying wave of sorrow, mixed with nausea, fear, and confusion. It crashed over her like a tsunami, and it could have easily carried her down into some dark internal place of quivering whimpering indecision.
But something clicked in her brain, like the tripping of an electrical relay. A shunting of mental circuit paths, routing her thoughts away from doubt, or sadness, or frailty. Energizing the part of her persona that was fearless Marine instead of ordinary civilian.
And just like that, her inner Jarhead reasserted itself.
She unzipped her backpack and groped for the M9 Beretta — her mind already buzzing with half-formed plans. There had to be a way to sneak in close to the fence. There just had to be. Some angle of approach; some line of sight, or feature of terrain. Some tricky little tactic that would give her a clear shot at the fucker who had killed Webb.
That’s all she needed. One clear shot. One chance to send the asshole straight to hell.
She got a grip on the 9mm, pulled it out, and jacked a round into the pipe. The weight of the weapon felt good in her hand.
No. One bullet wouldn’t be enough. She’d put the whole magazine into the bastard’s head. Fifteen rounds of 9mm jacketed hollow-point, right in the face.
The sun was sinking now, the shadows growing longer. Lights were starting to come on in the windows of the few houses that were occupied.
She could wait for full dark, circle around to the left and move in from an oblique angle. Hug the dirt and creep toward that fence an inch at a time. Maybe…
That was the word that stopped her. Maybe.
Not a good word to use when you were planning an op. Not even an off-the-cuff job like this.
Maybe was another way of saying maybe not. Liv could deal with maybe not if her life was the only one on the line here. But it wasn’t.
Except for the North Koreans (and maybe a handful of bad actors in the Cuban government) she was the only person on the planet who knew that Point Orange was hot. If the site followed the expected pattern, there were six nuclear missiles hidden in the old sugar mill.
Webb had seen three for sure, and a possible fourth. And somebody had put a rifle slug through his brain to keep that information quiet.
If Liv went for the shooter and got herself killed, the location of the missile site would remain unconfirmed. Which meant a half-dozen nukes pointed at American cities.
How many lives were at risk from those missiles right now? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Maybe tens of millions?
She wasn’t sure, but she was certain about one thing. Her mission was no longer inside the fence of the sugar mill. She had the information that she and Webb had come for.
Now she just had to deliver it to her people.
Her teeth ground together so hard that her jaws hurt, but she forced herself to eject the magazine from the grip reservoir of the M9. She shucked the round out of the chamber, popped it back into the top of the magazine, and reseated the mag in the grip of the weapon.
The 9mm went back into the backpack, and she began walking straight north, trying to keep the deserted house between herself and the sugar mill.
Her eyes blurred with tears, but they were more from suppressed anger than from grief. The back of her throat burned with unused adrenaline.