“Well, it’s too late for that now.”
“Ah, man, this is why I hate civilians,” Danny said.
“So now that you didn’t stop them, got any ideas for wheels?”
“I see two other cars in the parking lot.”
“Probably don’t work,” Davies said, “or they would have shot them up, too.”
There were two other vehicles inside the parking lot, both sitting on extreme sides, as if their owners had purposefully parked them as far away from each other as possible. One was a beat-up black pick-up parked to their left, the other a small red sedan parked to their right.
Danny was saying, “See, that’s you being pessimistic, Davies. This is me being optimistic.”
“You really think this is the time to be optimistic?” Davies asked incredulously.
“Of course,” Danny said, with absolute certainty. “Will and I were stuck on a mountain in Afghanistan once for three weeks, eating goat cheese and drinking goat milk. If we had been pessimistic pandas like you back then, we would never have made it back to base.”
“That right?” Davies asked, looking over at Will.
“He’s exaggerating,” Will said. “He wishes we had goat milk.”
“In my mind, it will always be goat milk,” Danny said.
“Who are these guys?” Lara asked. “What do they want?”
“Besides the desire to keep us from driving away from here?” Danny said.
“Besides that, yeah.”
“Those are hazmat suits,” Will said. “Level B designs, from the looks of them. Protection against hazardous materials and chemicals.”
“What, you going to throw acid on them?” Danny grinned.
“I’m just saying, they’re no good against lead.”
Will stepped out in front of the window, raised the M4A1, and fired a single shot that shattered the school window and hit one of the men in hazmat suits, leaning out from behind the Tacoma, in the face. The gas mask lens shattered and the figure went down in a pile, his rifle clattering away harmlessly.
The remaining nine men immediately fired back.
She dropped to the floor and slid against the wall as glass shards rained down all around her. Bullets peppered the wall across from her, destroying the bulletin board and the map of the school, while more cascading glass covered the floor like rain.
She glanced up the hallway toward the auditorium and saw Elise and Megan holding onto each other against the relentless, earsplitting sound of gunfire. Thankfully, they were too far away to be hurt by falling glass.
Will was sitting behind the wall, between what was left of the window and the opened front doors, casually tapping his hand against the floor next to him. Danny sat nearby, equally calm, while Davies hugged the floor on his stomach as bullets zipped inside, piercing the doors that were now swinging wildly back and forth. The volley of gunfire had obliterated every inch of the trophy case that greeted visitors upon entering the school, and hard-earned trophies and pictures and even souvenir baseball bats had been shredded into tiny fragments under the torrid assault of lead.
Finally, mercifully, the shooting stopped.
Will slid back up along the wall, then poked his head out the window for a split second, scanned the parking lot, and quickly pulled his head back.
“Nice,” Danny said. “You couldn’t have given us a heads up there, chief?”
“Element of surprise,” Will said.
“Element of almost got my ass shot off.”
“What the hell?” Davies said, fuming.
Will shrugged back at him. “They destroyed our vehicles. That means they don’t want us leaving this place. They already made it clear they’re not friendlies.”
“Still, man, a little warning next time?” Danny said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“By the way,” Danny said, “I think they’re trying to outflank us. I saw one — possibly two — moving toward the back of the school.”
“You’re full of good news today, aren’t you?”
Danny grinned. “I aims to please. Just ask Carly.”
CHAPTER 35
WILL
Danny’s goat milk story reminded him of those two weeks in Afghanistan — not three, as Danny claimed. They were well into their second redeployment by then, and a mission to check if expelled Taliban forces had returned to a village in the Kunar Province went bad almost the second they climbed onboard the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. The reliable bird, first introduced in the ′70s and in service ever since, had trouble lifting off and came within a foot of shearing the roof off one of the base’s watchtowers.
He remembered exchanging a look with Danny. They were seated at the edge of the bird, strapped in by harnesses, and saw the whites of the tower guard’s eyes as the UH-60 came up on him and swooped away at the very last second.
So when the Black Hawk crashed into the side of a mountain more than sixteen kilometers short of their assigned landing zone, neither he nor Danny was surprised. They managed to survive with only minor bruises, as did the rest of the unit. Unfortunately, they lost both pilots, the cockpit having taken the brunt of the impact against the rocky terrain.
That was when they saw the goats standing nearby, watching them as they climbed out of the helicopter wreckage. The unit spent two weeks in the mountains, waiting for rescue that was delayed by an intense and prolonged sand storm, with nothing to eat but goat.
As he leaned back against the wall between what was left of the window over his right shoulder and the shattered twin front doors of the school to his left, he remembered the taste of goat and how much it sucked.
Somehow, some way, the two front doors were still hanging from their hinges, just barely, with maybe a hundred or so holes between the two of them. Whoever had hung those doors should be proud. They did their jobs, and then some.
Danny was crouched across from him, eyeing the long hallway to their left through the red dot sight of his M4A1. Will had sent Davies back to the auditorium doors to cover their backside with his G36.
He checked his watch: 10:16 a.m.
“What’s the plan?” Danny asked.
“We can’t retreat back into the auditorium. That’ll just get those people in there killed if there’s any kind of fight, which there will be.”
“Back to the ol’ maintenance room, then?”
“There’s no way out of there once we’re inside. Unless you feel like crawling through that passageway to the boys’ locker room. See Reason Number One for why that’s a no-go.”
“Kinda running out of options then, Kemosabe.”
Will glanced back at Lara. She sat next to Elise and Megan down the hallway, looking down at her Glock. She looked up and caught his eyes. They exchanged a tight smile.
He turned back to the doors. He didn’t have to poke his head out — there was probably a sniper out there waiting to take it off — to know the men in hazmat suits weren’t advancing yet, though the sound of a breaking window from the other side of the school indicated they weren’t going to stand still forever.
He was pretty sure they weren’t soldiers or even ex-law enforcement. He could tell by the way that they unloaded on the doors and window. They shot without purpose, firing back because he killed one of them. And they kept on firing their entire magazine, stopping only when empty. He caught sight of a couple of AR-15s, three AK-47s, and a few others he couldn’t quite make out from the distance, though he was sure one had a pump-action shotgun with a pistol grip.
“There’s Waldo,” Danny said calmly next to him.
Will looked up the hallway at a dark shape peering around the corner. Danny fired a single shot and the shape fell to the floor, where it lay and didn’t move.