The gunfire stopped. The stillness returned to the mountain, apart from a light hiss and some irregular clinks from the crippled car.
Roos wasn’t smiling.
Something was wrong.
Reilly wasn’t suicidal. He had consistently shown himself to be way too clever than to attempt a blind charge like that. Roos looked again through his binoculars, focusing on the head of the driver. Too many rounds had found their target-and even though the man was a pulped, bloodied mess, his head was still upright. With wasn’t natural. And the man wasn’t damaged enough for Roos to recoil when he saw enough to recognize the dead driver.
It sure as hell wasn’t Reilly.
I struggled to keep the car properly aligned as I guided it up the mountain.
It wasn’t easy, given that I wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor was I driving it by remote control. I was crouched in the footwell of the passenger seat, wearing a helmet and goggles and a vest, surrounded by body armor panels, with one hand on the selfie stick that I’d taped to the gas pedal and the other on the steering wheel.
Above and to my left, Tomblin was in the driver’s seat, held in position with enough duct tape to ensure he couldn’t move an inch. I’d even made sure Tomblin’s head would stay upright by running some tape around his neck and the headrest. His mouth was also taped shut. Only his eyes were free to roam, and they were darting back and forth between the road ahead and an intense, terrorized scowl that was directed right at me.
Kurt and Gigi had set up the visual aids for me: a smartphone taped to the big Lincoln’s front bumper, linked by video call to a 4G tablet they’d taped under the dashboard, where I could see it. It was cramped and awkward, but it was the only way I could see myself even getting close to the cabin in one piece.
The gunfire erupted the second the cabin appeared clearly on the monitor, remorseless large-caliber rounds raining down on the SUV from somewhere up ahead. I crouched lower and floored the pedal, aiming at the house as bits of the car and of Tomblin exploded all around me, showering me with all kinds of debris, hard and soft. Some rounds found their way to the Kevlar panels and punched into them, hard, kicking them back onto me, but I kept the pedal floored and kept it moving until the car shuddered and plowed into the ground for a full stop. Then the shooting stopped.
A panicked voice in my earbud blurted, “Reilly? Reilly! Jesus, are you OK?” It was Kurt, back at the clearing, at the controls of the Phantom.
The plan had worked in the sense that I’d made it up to the door of the cabin in one piece, but I needed to stay that way, which meant I needed to take one of those big guns out. Given the sound they made, the cycling rate and the damage they’d caused, I figured it was something like one of the M240 family of machine guns, positioned under cover outside rather than inside the house to allow for a quick repositioning and a bigger playing field.
“I’m fine, relax,” I whispered into my throat mike. “What do you see?”
“You’ve got two gunmen-on either side of the cabin.” He was flying it lower now, although I didn’t think it was visible or within earshot yet.
“The one to my right. I need a lock on him. Where is he, off the car’s nose?”
“I’d say, two o’clock.”
“I need more precision than that, Kurt. Give it to me in minutes. And be accurate, for God’s sake. I’m only going to get one shot at this.”
“OK, OK, hang on. I think, uh, thirteen.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, yes. Thirteen.”
I quickly asked, “Distance?”
“OK, uh, it’s around, uh, thirty yards. Yeah, I think that’s about right, I’m measuring off the length of the car. He’s behind what looks like some fallen logs.”
“OK. Hang on.”
I focused on my positioning, imagining the front-to-back axis of the car and locking it in my mind relative to everything around me. Then I closed my eyes and conjured up a mental picture of what Kurt had told me about my position relative to the shooter. I’d only get one shot at him and it had to count.
I adjusted my position and got the M4 ready, then I pulled out a stun grenade, pulled out its pin, focused my concentration, then lobbed it out the opening where the front windshield used to be, to the left of the car, the opposite side of the shooter I was going for. Flashbangs had very short fuses, two seconds in this case, so the small, perforated cylinder had barely left my hand when it went off in a deafening bang and a blinding flash. I knew its effects wouldn’t be as disorientating as they would if this were inside a room, but the blast was so powerful that, even inside the car, I was rocked by its concussion wave. It instantly created the desired result as more rounds erupted from the trees, but were directed away from the car. With my eyes closed, I spun around and came up from my crouch, M4 ready and already aimed in the direction and at the distance Kurt had spotted for me-and I opened my eye, looked through the scope, and there he was, for a second, the top of his head and the barrel of the gun barely visible through the light snowfall, the red dot inside the optic aligned on his forehead.
I squeezed the trigger and saw his head snap back in a burst of crimson.
One down, maybe two-and Roos-to go.
“Guide me out of here, quick,” I rasped.
“OK, I’m looking at your side of the car. There’s that large rock to your right that we saw before, at one o’clock,” he added, “and the trees are just beyond that, about ten yards farther.”
“Got it.”
The belts these guns used held a couple of hundred rounds at best, and given that they fired at upward of six hundred rounds per minute and seeing as how many hits the car had taken before this last onslaught, I figured whoever was manning them should be needing to restock their feeding tray by now. Regardless, I had to move fast. They now knew I was alive and in the car. I sucked in a couple of quick, deep breaths, then I pulled on the door handle and kicked the door out, following it out in the same frenzied move. I rolled on the ground before coming up in a crouch and I sprinted towards the rock, bullets kicking up the slush around my feet. I didn’t shoot back, saving the rounds of my M4 until I had something viable to shoot at. I made it to the rock just as more bullets ate into it, sending shards of it flicking around me. The shooter was on the other side of the house from me now and I knew the rock would protect me. I had no idea where the third guy, if there was one, was, nor if Roos was in the cabin or elsewhere.
I figured I couldn’t stay where I was for too long and I couldn’t cut across in the open, so the best option seemed to be to get to the cabin and work my way around it or through it to take out the guy with the big gun on its opposite side. I peeked out, took in my position. I couldn’t see any movement. I figured that if I took the direct route to the cabin, I’d be exposed longer than if I went parallel to its side initially, then cut across to it-longer, but safer, unless there was a shooter in one of its side windows. It had three-two on the ground floor that gave on to the porch and a third on the floor above. I debated going the extra ten yards away and using the edge of the tree line, but the soil there would be less even than the clearing I was in; more snow would have settled there under the bare branches, and I’d be moving less confidently while risking a fall.
I steeled myself for the move, then sprinted out from behind the large rock, running parallel to the side of the house. Snowflakes licked my face as gunfire erupted immediately from the same shooter but, surprisingly, nothing came from the cabin. I ran as fast as I could and, within seconds, the shooting stopped as the gunner lost his bead on me. I cut across the field, headed straight for the cabin now, and hurdled onto the porch before slamming to a stop against the log wall.