“They’re dangerous,” Jonathan countered. “All wounded animals are dangerous. Wounded animals who know how to shoot even more so. Stay away from them.”
“But they’re bleeding. Can’t you help them?”
Boxers said, “Let ’em bleed long enough and they won’t need help.”
Leave it to Big Guy to take it one step too far.
“What happens next?” Ryan asked.
Jonathan answered by walking to the stacked firearms and ammunition, and coming back with two M16s and two belts of spare magazines. “What happens next is, it gets interesting,” he said. “How about giving me back that peashooter and taking this instead? Give that left arm of yours a workout.”
The kid took it, but he wasn’t happy about it.
“You want to shoot it out with them?” Christyne gasped. The horror was evident in both her tone and her body language. “They’ll kill us.”
“Bet you thought you were dead ten minutes ago, didn’t you?” Boxer said. His voice rolled through the rafters of the sanctuary.
“But there must be a hundred people out there.”
Jonathan held out a rifle for her. “But there’s five of us.” He said it with his most charming smile.
“That means we have to shoot twenty apiece,” Ryan said.
“Well,” Jonathan said, “some of them will run away.” He was trying to keep it as light as he could, because the reality of their situation was at best dire.
“Generally speaking, we prefer to plan a little more carefully,” Gail said from up at the altar. “But the whole execution thing put us on a fast track.” To Jonathan, she said, “Everything’s battened down back there.”
“Are you really a friend of my dad’s?” Ryan asked.
Christyne brightened. “You know Boomer?”
“We worked together for a while,” Jonathan said.
“So you’re in the Army?”
Jonathan gave a coy smile. “We worked together for a while.”
“Hey, Boss,” Boxers said from the red side wall. “I think you, me, and Gunslinger need to powwow.”
Gail heard for herself and walked that way.
To the Nasbes, Jonathan said, “You guys go on with your reunion. Stay away from the wounded, and if you see anything scary, yell out right away.”
With that, he walked across the sanctuary to join his colleagues. “What’s up?” As if he didn’t know.
“You realize our position is untenable, right?” Boxers asked, getting right to it.
Jonathan inhaled loudly. These sorts of standoffs never worked out well for the people behind the barricade. Even with the reinforced walls, the good guys were still only one RPG round or even a bonfire away from dying in place or being overrun. “I’m open to any and all ideas,” he said.
“Well, let’s take surrender off the table first,” Boxers said. “It’s not in my nature.”
“Nor in mine,” Jonathan agreed. “Besides, their judicial system here sucks.”
“We have the wounded,” Gail said. “They should give us at least a little leverage, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Jonathan said. “They’re taught to kill themselves rather than submit. If that’s their worldview, the wounded are just collateral damage.”
“I agree,” Boxers said. “So they’re coming. What do you think? Good old-fashioned frontal assault?”
Jonathan shrugged. “If I were them, I’d run a feint attack on one side to buy time to set charges on the doors. Blow them, they’re inside and we’re dead.”
Gail looked horrified. “You know, playing with you guys is nowhere near as fun as I had hoped.”
Boxers said, “So, we each take a side and stick to our posts no matter what. Is that it?”
Jonathan shrugged. “The best I can come up with. We’ll keep the Nasbes together on the green side. I’ll take white. Big Guy, you’re red. Gunslinger-”
“Black,” she said. “I got it. And when we get home, I’m getting a new handle.”
“All right,” Boxers said, heading to his post. “We’ll have us a good old-fashioned gunfight.” He’d never sounded more self-actualized.
Jonathan headed off to give the Nasbes their assignments. He gave them a crash course in how to work their weapons, and then took them into the vestry and planted them in front of their assigned windows.
“Keep your selector on single fire,” he told them for the second time. “If you see someone with a gun, shoot. If they fall down, move to the next target. If they don’t, shoot them again. Questions?”
Each of their faces was like a giant blank oval.
“Okay, good. I’ll be in the front. If you need anything, just shout out.” The muzzle of Christyne’s rifle had started to drift in toward Jonathan, so he reached out and gently pushed it to the side. “And try to remember to keep your weapon pointed outside.”
“But the windows on the other side of the shutters are closed,” Ryan said.
“They’re glass,” Jonathan said. “They’ll go away once the shooting starts.”
This wasn’t the way an 0300 mission was supposed to go. If they came out the back end of this thing alive, he was going to owe Boomer one hell of an explanation.
CHAPTER THIRTY – TWO
Kendig’s ten-minute deadline was overly ambitious, but he’d known that when he’d first issued it. It would take longer than that to get the Army fully outfitted and ready to fight. Ultimately, as the deadline came and went, that would further unnerve the Users who had commandeered the assembly hall.
The silence from inside the building seemed to have unsettled the soldiers in his Army as they moved farther and farther back from the building. There’d been no more suggestion of mutiny since Brother Kurt’s outburst, but the invader’s radio ruse had had some impact. Outside the Army’s security force, Kendig hadn’t had a lot of contact with the rank and file because there’d been no need. He was on the Board of Elders, and as such served an executive role; but living off the compound as he did, he didn’t get much opportunity to interact in routine matters.
All of that translated to not a lot of personal loyalty.
The ranks had thinned considerably. Some of his soldiers had been martyred, but he suspected that even more had fled. Those who remained-he figured it to be a force of eighty, maybe eighty-five-were terrified.
The assault that lay ahead fell far outside any training that the cadre of soldiers had received. Their training had always focused on specialized two- or three-person disruption teams who focused on their particular missions. The idea of a mass assault had never been addressed.
But now it was necessary.
Once Sister Colleen returned from Brother Michael’s house with his equipment, they’d be ready to begin. He’d allowed her to take his sheriff’s vehicle, so it shouldn’t take long.
As that thought was passing through his mind, he saw lights moving to his right, and he turned to see his Ford sedan pulling onto the grass from the driveway and heading straight toward him. When it stopped, he was shocked to see four people climb out. He walked over to join them, and as he closed to within a few yards, he recognized the sentry staff from the front gate.
“I found them tied up in the trees,” Sister Colleen explained as she opened the tailgate and pulled out two cases that looked not unlike electric guitar cases, but which in fact contained Barrett M82A3 fifty-caliber sniper rifles.
Kendig lost interest in the sentries and turned his attention to the rifles. “Only two?”
“The other two are missing,” Colleen explained.
Kendig scowled. “You checked the armory rooms in the basement?”
“That’s where I found these.”
“And the ammunition?”
Sister Colleen pointed to the two cans on the car deck. “That’s them. Green and silver tips, right?”
Kendig smiled. The heavy walls of the assembly hall made a conventional assault virtually impossible, but these Raufoss MK 211 explosive penetrator rounds would make quick work of it all. Tipped with an RDX explosive mixture, the Raufoss round left the barrel at twenty-eight hundred feet per second, but on impact with armor would launch a tungsten spike at four thousand feet per second to punch a three-quarter-inch hole. As the penetrator continued through the hole, it would spew zirconium particles, which would then ignite like a high-velocity sparkler. What wasn’t dismembered by the penetrator or blown apart by the high-order detonation of the RDX would likely be incinerated in the long-burning cloud of zirconium.